i Table of Contents
Christophe Den Tandt Professor Université Libre de Bruxelles
Postmodernism in Anglo-American Fiction
VOL II: First-Generation Postmodernism: Thomas Pynchon; Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.; Julian Barnes
v Table of Contents
0.1 Online Information ...... vii 0.2 Scope of the Present Notes ...... vii 0.3 Bibliographical Sources ...... vii 0.4 Formatting and Style Sheet ...... vii
2.3 First-Generation Postmodernist Fiction ...... 114 2.3.1 US Fiction from the 1950 to the '70s ...... 114
2.3.2 Thomas Pynchon (1937-) ...... 119 2.3.2.1 Biography ...... 119 2.3.2.2 Pynchon’s Works ...... 120 2.3.2.2.1 Literary influences: “Traditional” vs. Beat Fiction ...... 120 2.3.2.2.2 Slow Learner ...... 122 2.3.2.2.3 V ...... 122 2.3.2.2.4 The Crying of Lot 49 ...... 123 2.3.2.2.5 Gravity’s Rainbow ...... 123 2.3.2.2.6 Vineland ...... 127 2.3.2.2.7 Mason and Dixon ...... 127 2.3.2.2.8 Against the Day ...... 128 2.3.2.2.9 Inherent Vice ...... 128
2.3.2.2 The Crying of Lot 49: Analysis ...... 129 2.3.2.2.1 Synopsis ...... 129 2.3.2.3.2 A James Joyce Cartoon ...... 129 2.3.2.3.2.1 Cartoonesque (Post)modernism ...... 129 2.3.2.3.2.2 A Realist Premise? Suburbia and its Discontents ...... 131 2.3.2.3.2.3 Subverting the Mythical Method ...... 132
2.3.2.3.3 A Literary Map of Techno-Consumerist America ...... 136 2.3.2.3.3.1 Pynchon and the “Great American Novel” ...... 136 2.3.2.3.3.2 Allegorical Snapshots of Inverarity’s estate ...... 137 2.3.2.3.3.2.1 A Catalogue of Subject Positions ...... 137 2.3.2.3.3.2.2 Mucho’s Car-Lot Nightmare ...... 138 2.3.2.3.3.2.3 Mucho’s Muzak Revelation ...... 140 2.3.2.3.3.2.4 The Pensive Girl in the Tower ...... 141 2.3.2.3.3.2.5 The San Narciso Epiphany ...... 142 2.3.2.3.3.2.5.1 Cities in the Semblance of Electronic Circuitry ...... 142 2.3.2.3.3.2.5.2 The Disappearance of Nature ...... 144 2.3.2.3.3.2.5.3 Nostalgia ...... 147 2.3.2.3.3.2.5.4 The Marginalization of Dissent ...... 150 2.3.2.3.3.2.5.5 Hieroglyphic Revelations: Postmodernist Romance ...... 151 2.3.2.3.3.2.6 Semiotic Ecstasy and Paranoid Delirium ...... 153 2.3.2.3.3.2.7 Apocalypse v. Internal Exile ...... 154 2.3.2.3.3.3 Closure v. the Promise of Openness ...... 155
2.3.2.3.4 The Tristero narrative ...... 157 2.3.2.3.4.1 Subcultures, Countercultures, Dissent ...... 157 2.3.2.3.4.2 A Counterforce for the Information Age ...... 157 2.3.2.3.4.3 The Elusiveness of Diversity ...... 159 2.3.2.3.4.4 The Tristero Narrative: Story Analysis ...... 161 2.3.2.3.4.4.1 “Story” v. “Plot” ...... 161 2.3.2.3.4.4.2 Thurn and Taxis v. Tristero: a Story of Postal Subversion...... 161 2.3.2.3.4.4.3 The Courier’s Tragedy: Pynchon’s Use of Family Narratives ...... 166 2.3.2.3.4.5 The Tristero Narrative: “Plot” Analysis ...... 168 2.3.2.3.4.5.1 In Borrowed Voices: Authenticity v. Intertextuality ...... 168 2.3.2.3.4.5.2 Paranoia and Undecidable Narrative Focalization ...... 169 2.3.2.3.4.5.3 Paper Trail and Borgesian Labyrinths ...... 175 2.3.2.3.4.5.3.1 The Legacy of Crime Fiction ...... 175 2.3.2.3.4.5.3.2 Borgesian Metafiction ...... 176 vi Table of Contents
2.3.2.3.4.5.4 Embedded Stories and “Narrative Donors” ...... 177
2.3.2.3.5 The Crying of Lot 49: conclusion ...... 179
2.3.3 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr...... 181 2.3.3.1 Biography ...... 181
2.3.3.2 Slaughterhouse-Five ...... 182 2.3.3.2.1 A Novel that Defies Genre Categories ...... 182 2.3.3.2.2 Metafiction in Slaughterhouse-Five ...... 182 2.3.3.2.2.1 The Gamut of Vonnegut’s Metafictional Techniques ...... 182 2.3.3.2.2.2 The Psychological Motivation of Metafiction ...... 184 2.3.3.2.3 Affluence, Anxiety, Trauma, and Healing ...... 184 2.3.3.2.4 Existentialism in Slaughterhouse-Five ...... 185 2.3.3.2.4.1 The Existentialist Legacy ...... 185 2.3.3.2.4.2 Existentialism and the War Experience ...... 186 2.3.3.2.4.2.1 War as Embodiment of the Absurd ...... 186 2.3.3.2.4.2.2 Existential “Bastards”: Inadequate Responses to the Absurdity of War ...... 186 2.3.3.2.4.3 Existentialist Comedy: Black humor, the Grotesque, and Existential Clowns ...... 187 2.3.3.2.5 A Political Counternarrative ...... 188 2.3.3.2.6 A Postmodernist Heterotopia? ...... 189
2.3.4 Julian Barnes ...... 192
2.3.4.1 Postmodernist Fiction in Britain ...... 192
2.3.4.2. Historiographic Metafiction / Metafictional Romances ...... 193 2.3.4.2.1 The Status of History in Postmodern Culture ...... 193 2.3.4.2.2 Specific Concerns of Historiographic Metafiction ...... 198 2.3.4.2.2.1 The Elusive Line between Historical Narrative and Fiction ...... 198 2.3.4.2.2.2 Ideological refocalization ...... 199
2.3.4.3 Julian Barnes's biography ...... 200
2.3.4.4 A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters ...... 201 2.3.4.4.1 Ostensibly, a Playful Approach to History ...... 201 2.3.4.4.2 Focalization, Unreliable Voices, and Referential Undecidability ...... 203 2.3.4.4.3 Historical Truth and the Constraints of Art ...... 205 2.3.4.4.4 Transcending History ...... 210 vii Table of Contents
0.1 Online Information
The web pages listed below contain important practical information about the course (schedule, examination questions, bibliography).
http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~cdentand/b315sylpostmod.htm (basic information) http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~cdentand/b315postmodsched.htm (week by week schedule / reading list / web links to primary texts [poems]) http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~cdentand/b315lpostmodbibl.htm (bibliography) http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~cdentand/b315postmodexquest.htm (exam questions and keywords)
Documents relevant to the course—the slides presentations used for class lectures, notably— are available on the ULB’s Université Virtuelle web site :
https://uv.ulb.ac.be/login/index.php
0.2 Warning: Scope of the Present Course Notes
The present course notes are based on the slides presentations displayed in class and on notes devoted to previous versions of the course. They cover the historical and theoretical topics discussed during lectures, as well as some important aspects of the close readings developed in class. However, for close readings, students are also expected to rely on their own lecture notes as well. Also course notes such are meant as introductory textbooks for students. They therefore do not entirely fulfill the requirements of academic research, notably as far as bibliographical referencing is concerned. Note that some of the sections of the present notes are transcripts of lectures delivered as of the 1990s. These sections have not always been updated to include state-of-the-art research.
0.3 Bibliographical Sources
The bibliographical sources on which the present notes are based are listed on the following web page:
http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~cdentand/b315lpostmodbibl.htm
0.4 Warning: Formatting and Bibliographical Standards:
The present course notes are meant to serve as study aids. They have therefore been formatted according to typographical standards meant to facilitate your studying process. This means notably that, as far as typographical and bibliographical conventions are concerned, the present course notes cannot possibly serve as model for research papers and theses. You will find the proper formatting and bibliographical style sheets in the Guidelines for Research Papers and Theses textbook, as well as on the appropriate web sites mentioned in the latter volume. 114 First-Generation Postmodernist Fiction
2.3 First-Generation Postmodernist Fiction
2.3.1 US Fiction from the 1950s to the '70s
The development of the first-generation of postmodernist fiction marked a revival of experimental writing after the 1940s and ’50s. The US novel had been flourishing in the 1950s, yet, unlike in the 1920s and 1930s, it did not display a clearly marked stylistic tendency.
– The 1920s had been the decade of modernism: Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, Zora Neale Hurston, Thomas Clayton Wolfe [figs. 134-38].
Figures 134-38: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Stein, Faulkner, Hurston
– The 1930s marked a return to realism and naturalism (the second generation of American literary naturalism): John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, James Thomas Farrell [figs. 139-40].
Figures 139, 140: Wright; Steinbeck
As of the 1940s, the previous currents (realism/naturalism; modernism) coexisted:
. Realism/naturalism: Norman Mailer, Jerome David Salinger, Saul Bellow, John Updike, William Styron [figs. 141-45].
Figures 141-45: Mailer, Salinger, Bellow, Updike, Styron
115 First-Generation Postmodernist Fiction
. Modernism reasserted itself in the 1950s both in terms of literary production (Ralph Ellison, Henry Miller) and as a focus of academic interest (the rise of Faulkner’s fame in the post-WWII decades).
Postwar novelists are often grouped according to ethnic or regional categories. In terms of readerly reception, the period marked the rise of minority, ethnic, or regional American fiction:
. Jewish American Fiction: Saul Bellow, Philip Roth [fig. 146].
. The Southern Novel and Southern Gothic: William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote [figs. 147-48].
Figures 146-48: Roth, McCullers, Capote
. African American Fiction: Richard Wright, Paula Marshall, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin [figs 149-51].
Figures 149-151: Ellison, Petry, Baldwin
Several literary or intellectual movements are, however, regarded as specific to the postwar period, even though they often emerged earlier:
. Existentialism: the philosophical movement associated with the figure of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre had a deep impact on many writers and playwrights as of the 1930s: Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Richard Wright, J. D. Salinger, the Theater of the Absurd (Samuel Beckett) [figs. 152-54]
Figures 152-154: Beckett, Miller, Sartre 116 First-Generation Postmodernist Fiction
. The Beat movement: the Beats were a typically American popular avant- garde, mingling romanticism and modernist experimentalism. Beat literature produced mostly poetry (Allen Ginsberg) and poetic, autobiographical prose (Jack Kerouac) [figs. 155-56].
. The New Journalism: the 1960s witnessed the rise of a new form of nonfiction literary prose: Truman Capote (In Cold Blood [1966]), Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe (Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Jr.) [figs 157-58].
Figures 155-58: Ginsberg, Kerouac, Didion, Wolfe.
The first generation of US postmodernist fiction developed as of the 1960s into the 1970s:
. Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller (Catch 22 [1961]), William S. Burroughs (The Naked Lunch [1959]), John Barth (Giles, Goat-Boy [1966]), Donald Barthelme, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., John Irving (The World According to Garp [1978]), Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy [1985-86]) [figs. 159-62].
Figures 159-63: Pynchon, Barthelme, Irving, Auster, Burroughs
First-generation postmodernists wrote novels that bear the traces of the intellectual movements of the 1950s.
. In terms of politics and world view, their works were deeply influenced by existentialism and the Beat movement. Symptomatically, William S. Burroughs, whose fiction may be described as postmodern (The Naked Lunch [1959]; The Soft Machine [1961]), was one of the core members of the Beat movement. 117 First-Generation Postmodernist Fiction
. Postmodern novelists often mix fiction and documentary, thus displaying the influence of the New Journalism.
Their most conspicuous specificities are the following:
. An experimental style in the tradition of modernism.
. A predilection for grotesque humor (“black” humor) inspired by existentialism.
. Anti-establishment, countercultural politics derived from the beat movement.
. The use of metafictional devices, borrowed from late modernist writers (Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, the French “New Novel”). First-generation postmodernist writers produced a variety of fiction that investigates the nature of fiction itself (see 2.1).
. Thomas Pynchon: biography 118
2.3.2 Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937-)
2.3.2.1 Biography1
Figure 164: graphic montage on the basis of one of the few existing photographs of Thomas Pynchon, mingled with hallmark elements of his first novels.
Thomas Pynchon’s fiction developed shortly after late modernism (see 1.1.2.1). Compared to late modernists like Borges and Beckett, however, Pynchon seems to write from a very different cultural scene: he is mostly a writer whose sensibility was shaped by the 1960s and 1970s, and his work is deeply anchored in American culture. Yet there are many literary continuities between Pynchon and the late modernists: his novels display the same mixture of intellectualizing commentary and grotesque humor, and they also consistently resort to metafictional strategies. On the other hand, some issues are specific to Pynchon and to authors of his generation. Particularly, Pynchon is concerned with the status of free agency and countercultural movements within postindustrial societies dominated by urbanization and communication technologies. His works are, in this respect, a reflection on the kind of political and cultural dissent that is available in the context of Cold War America.
Figure 165: Thomas Pynchon, as he appears in his high-school yearbook.
Thomas Pynchon, ever since the publication of The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow, has been regarded as one of the leading figures of postmodernist American fiction, and has accordingly been awarded several important literary prizes. Establishing a biography of Pynchon is extremely difficult, however, because this American writer has been one of the most discreet—even secretive—in the history of contemporary literature (in this, he resembles J. D. Salinger, the author of The Catcher in the Rye [1951]). Pynchon has steadfastly refused to inform critics and journalists of his biographical circumstances, and, to this day, he resents those who are trying to track him down. Symptomatically, there are only a small number of photographs of the writer. For a long time, his biographical notices were illustrated by a picture taken from his high-school yearbook [1953]. In his preface to the short-story collection Slow Learner [1984], however, Pynchon has provided a few comments on his early career.
1 This biography is established on the basis of Paula Geyh, Fred G. Leebron and Andrew Levy’s Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), p. 4. Thomas Pynchon: biography 119
Figure 166: Pynchon in the Navy.
Pynchon was born in Glen Cove, New York, and he studied at Cornell University, in Ithaca (upstate New York), where he attended Vladimir Nabokov’s lectures. In Slow Learner, describes himself as an “unpolitical ’50s student,” living in an age of censorship, when conflicts were “muted.» This was indeed the era of McCarthyism and of ’50s conformity. Pynchon spent his military service in the Navy, an inspiration for his later works dealing in part with characters working in the military. He moved to Greenwich Village for a time, then to Seattle, where he worked as a technical writer for the Boeing Aircraft corporation—the model for the Yoyodine corporation depicted in V and in Crying. The technical side of his training would resurface massively in Gravity’s Rainbow, which deals partly with WWII technology. In the early 1960s, he moved to Mexico where he completed his first novel V. Since then, he has carefully avoided any media attention. He turned down an invitation to teach literature at Bennington College. He is known to have signed a 1968 anti-Vietnam-war petition. He spent most of the late 1960s and early 1970s in California, where he was in contact with the hippie counterculture. This experience is reflected in Vineland and the recent Inherent Vice. He currently resides in New York.
Critics feared that Pynchon might have been a spent force after the publication of his critically acclaimed Gravity’s Rainbow [1973]. Yet after an interruption of seventeen years, he started publishing again in the 1990s, including the highly praised Mason and Dixon, as well as two new novels since 2000.
2.3.2.2 Pynchon’s Works
2.3.2.2.1 Literary Influences: “Traditional” vs. Beat Fiction.
While critics now classify Pynchon as the leading figure of a well-defined generation (1960s and 1970s postmodernism), Pynchon himself does not seem to have had such a self-confident sense of embodying a specific movement. For obvious reasons, he could not style himself as a postmodern writer, since the latter term came in common academic use only in the 1980s. Accordingly, in the preface to Slow Learner, Pynchon describes his situation at the outset of his career as falling in between more visible cultural currents: he writes that he lived in a “post-Beat passage of cultural time.» Young writers of his generation were reduced to the role of “onlookers,» yearning for anything new or exciting in these “muted” fifties. Possible sources of excitement included novelist Saul Bellow, jazz music, Beat prose writer Jack Kerouac, realist novelist and essayist Norman Mailer, or even rock ‘n’ roll performer Elvis Presley
A passage in The Crying of Lot 49 [p. 71] expresses this lack of clear cultural affiliation. At one point in the narrative, the heroine Oedipa Maas visits the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. The university is described as a place of freedom of expression: this is Berkeley at the time of the early anti-Vietnam War protest, right before the hippie movement. However, Oedipa cannot entirely connect to the younger people because she has been raised in the context of the 1950s, a period of political conservatism (McCarthyism) and sexual repression—in the “muted ‘50s.” Thomas Pynchon: biography 120
P 71 “For she had undergone her own educating at a time of nerves, blandness and retreat among not only her fellow students but also most of the visible structure around and ahead of them ... “
The text suggests that the repressive context of the 1950s is responsible for Oedipa’s obsession with conspiracies and hidden meanings. This description seems to fit Pynchon’s own situation: he was too young to be one of the rebel beat writers (and probably came from a background that made this radicalism unlikely), and too old to merge smoothly into the flower power generation of the late sixties, a period that he would later describe in Vineland and Inherent Vice.
Likewise, in Slow Learner, Pynchon describes the literary landscape of his early career in terms different from what we would expect. Instead of insisting on the distinction between modernism and postmodernism, as many contemporary critics do, Pynchon states that people of his generation distinguished between “traditional “ and “beat “ novels. This implies, on the one hand, that the novels that we now consider central to modernism (Joyce, Woolf, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Lawrence ...) were no longer regarded as new or revolutionary by young writers of the 1950s: they were already part of the literary canon. Beat literature, on the contrary, was something of a forbidden fruit for college-educated intellectuals. In this respect, Pynchon’s situation is very different from that of writers like Beckett or Nabokov. Indeed, in his early career, Beckett felt it his duty to underline the novelty of 1920s and 1930s modernist writing.2
Conversely, Pynchon’s admiration for beat writers—Jack Kerouac’s On the Road [1957]; William Burrough’s Naked Lunch or Nova Express [1964]; Allen Ginsberg’s Howl [1956]—indicates that we cannot entirely read his works as abstruse, erudite fiction meant for an academic audience. The Beat movement offered a libertarian reading of the American dream, rooted, for instance, in the progressive pastoralism of nineteenth-century poet Walt Whitman. Against the development of the new postwar consumption society, Beat writers advocated an ideal of intellectual enthusiasm, sexual liberation and pacifism. They were in this respect direct predecessors of the sixties counterculture, a movement to which they bequeathed, among other things, an interest in Eastern religions and philosophies, as well as a deep-seated devotion to African American music (Jazz: Be-Bop, Charlie Parker). These eastern or popular culture influences were viewed as an antidote to materialism and consumerism. Thus, by drawing on these sources, Pynchon wants to place his own work in an American tradition of what we might call democratic dissent, a movement that runs from the mid-19th-century American Renaissance (Whitman, Henry David Thoreau) to the beats and the hippies in the 1950s and 1960s. Pynchon mentions, for instance, that he admired the beats’ ability to handle colloquial American English, working-class accents, particularly. It was obviously important for Pynchon, as a young writer, to show that he was able to produce prose that was not a direct emanation of the academic world or literary magazines. This
2 Beckett was even called to stand as witness for the defence when Joyce was accused of writing pornography (Ulysses, that is: this was catholic Ireland in the 1930s). Beckett turned out to be a very ineffective supporting witness in this matter: the public prosecutor made him appear as the typically arrogant intellectual who would presumably enjoy high-brow pornography. Thomas Pynchon: biography 121 accounts for his insistence on the need to use colloquialisms in his language, and to represent practices and habits (drugs, a freer sexuality) that were typical of the beat counterculture.
Yet, compared to the beats, Pynchon writes prose that seems more controlled, more subjected to a deliberate literary elaboration. This more rigid sense of novelistic form can be made visible by comparing Pynchon to William Burroughs—a writer who is also regarded as both postmodern and beat. Burroughs wrote novels that are so “free» that they seem entirely chaotic. Burroughs uses in his texts what he calls the “cut-up» technique: the text is made up of fragments of several story-lines—fragments that were sometimes created by literally cutting up a pre-existing manuscript by means of scissors. This technique, Burroughs explains, is suited to record the stream-of-consciousness of drug addicts. In practice, Burroughs’s Naked Lunch presents a sequence of often surrealistic passages dealing with the drug culture and homosexuality. The text is often comic, consistently obscene and extremely candid about the specifics of drug addiction. However, while Pynchon regularly inserts scenes of orgies in his novel as well as allusions to drug use, the overall atmosphere of his novels is never as free-floating as in Burroughs: colloquialism and radicalism are always counterbalanced by the development of a more abstract reflections about politics and culture, or by intertextual allusions. In this sense, Pynchon seems as close to Borges and Joyce, for instance, as he is to Burroughs.
Figure 167: Young Thomas Pynchon.
2.3.2.2.2 Slow Learner (early stories; unpublished until 1984)
Chronologically speaking, Pynchon first wrote a set of stories which were published only in the 1980s. One of these stories, entitled “Entropy,» announces the writer’s interest for scientific theories, particularly the theory of thermodynamics, which describes the evolution of the universe toward an increasing state of disorder. The collection also contains a preface by Pynchon, which constitutes one of the few texts in which the writer discusses his own practice (in fact, with great clarity).
2.3.2.2.3 V [1963]
Pynchon’s first novel won the Faulkner Prize. It established the writer’s status as one of the main voices in postwar American fiction. V starts in the contemporary setting of 1958. Some of the main characters in the novel’s huge cast of dramatis personae are Benny Profane, Seaman Bodine and Herbert Stencil. The first two are US Navy seamen and the latter a British intelligence officer. As the narrative develops, it takes the form of a detective mystery, a spy thriller, a conspiracy narrative, and an historical novel. In fact, in this first novel, Pynchon already practices the genre in which most of his later works will fit—metahistorical romance or historiographic metafiction, i.e. the type of postmodern writing that mingles self- conscious experimentation and historical narration (see 2.3.4.2).
Figure 168: Picador edition of V. Thomas Pynchon: biography 122
The historical plot of this first novel focuses on Stencil’s attempt to trace the manifestations of a mysterious woman, called V, who played an important part in several historical crises of 20th-c. history. Thanks to this thriller plot, the narrative moves to different parts of the world—Malta, Italy, Egypt, the German Southwest Protectorate—from the late- 19th-century to the present. V turns out to be an elusive figure, whose existence is never fully established. On the one hand, this enigmatic heroine seems to play the part of what in a modernist novel would have been a unifying symbol: the term “V” is given many different interpretations, which help us link various episodes of Pynchon’s rambling plot. Yet this symbolic term is never given a single, assignable value. It cannot therefore really be said to “unify” the meaning of the text. In this latter sense, V may, on the contrary, embody a principle of disorder—the physical principle of entropy, which is mentioned in several of Pynchon’s novels. Disorder affects the shape of Pynchon’s novel itself, which is not given any clear resolution. From a literary viewpoint, Pynchon seems to be experimenting with directionless (i.e. non-teleological) narrative: the storyline, while fairly clear at each point of the novel, never seems to be heading to a well-defined goal; the comic story, with its huge cast of characters, goes on and on, from one incident to the next. This narrative device is important for postmodern novelists. It recurs to a lesser extent in Pynchon’s other works. According to Fiedler and Hassan, this sense of indirection, of disorder distinguishes postmodernist fiction from its modernist models.
2.3.2.2.4 The Crying of Lot 49 [1966]
With this second novel, Pynchon establishes the set of themes that he will keep investigating in his later works: the possibility of resisting power under postindustrialism. The novel is structured as a detective story focusing on clandestine groups and their private networks of postal communication (see 2.3.3.3 for an extended analysis).
Figure 169: Cover of The Crying of Lot 49.
2.3.2.2.5 Gravity’s Rainbow [1973]
Pynchon’s third novel is regarded as a central text of postmodern literature. However, because of its length and intricacy, it has enjoyed a more limited readership than Crying. It offers, from the perspective of multiple allegorical plots, a pessimistic reflection on political and technological power as it developed from the end of WWII into the Cold War years. The main center of attention here is not telecommunication and the postal system, as it is in Crying, but rather the rocket technology elaborated by German military engineers on Hitler’s orders—particularly, the V2 (or A4) rocket, whose parabolic, rainbow-shaped flight is alluded to in the title. Thomas Pynchon: biography 123
Figure 170: Penguin edition of Gravity’s Rainbow, featuring blueprints of V2 rockets.
Unlike Crying, whose main character is a woman, GR unfolds within a predominantly masculine context—the world of officers, military engineers and spies. Most of the central characters enjoy a specific link to the V2 rocket: Weissmann, a German SS-officer is in charge of the rocket program; Katje and her brother Gottfried are Weismann’s lovers, and help him run rocket batteries (Katje, one of Pynchon’s numerous Lolita figures, is also a British spy); Hans Pökler, an engineer, works under Weissmann’s orders; Tchitcherine, a Russian officer, wants to capture the rocket, as does corporal Enzian, the leader of the Schwarzkommando, a group of renegade SS troops manned (against all ideological verisimilitude) by recruits of Southwest African origin. Enigmatically, these black SS troops were initially a pure invention of British military intelligence—part of a propaganda scheme meant to scare the Germans; yet the Schwarzkommando do materialize in Germany. Beyond its obvious military usefulness, the rocket fascinates these characters because it is a concrete symbol of what we might call the management of chaos: it is a human-made replica of chaotic natural forces, whose action must—but can only imperfectly be—controlled (think of the later mishaps of the different space programs). This obsession with chaos and control also lies at the root of several depictions of sado-masochistic rituals in the novel, usually involving Weissmann and his young lovers: through the scripted rituals, Weismann attempts to control, to diminish the fearsome horrors of the wars, in the same way as he attempts to control the chaotic energies of the rocket.
Figure 171: montage illustrating Gravity’s main themes.
The character who is most intimately tied to the V2 is arguably Tyrone Slothrop, an American officer who serves as central figure within this very decentered novel. Slothrop’s sexual drives seem indeed mysteriously connected to the fall of the missiles. Intelligence officers realize that, statistically speaking, rockets tend to hit buildings in which Slothrop has had sex with one of his numerous London mistresses: Slothrop keeps a map of his conquests, and it fits the pattern of the V2 hits. It is as if Slothrop’s erections were somehow connected to the new weapons. Slothrop’s unaccountable sexuality has a symbolic value: the character embodies the idea that 20th-century technology, as developed by the Thomas Pynchon: biography 124 military-industrial complex, creates a connection between sexuality (initially a life-enhancing drive) and death—indeed military mass destruction. Slothrop himself decides to desert from his army job, and to roam through occupied Germany (the “Zone,” as Pynchon calls it) in order to investigate the origin of his sexual oddity. His life story, as he progressively manages to piece it together, allegorizes the logic of enslavement to corporate technology. As an infant, he was sold by his parents to an American subsidiary of the German chemical cartel I.G. Farben. A psychologist at I.G. Farben—the enigmatic Laszlo Jamf—apparently managed to coordinate baby Slothrop’s erections to a “mystery stimulus”—a Pavlovian training that resulted in Slothrop’s later response to the V2s. The procedure apparently involved the use of a synthetic substance called Imipolex G, which seems to facilitate universal sexual arousal, thus enabling the bond between technology and desire.
That the nature of the stimulus (or of Imipolex G) should never be clarified in the text is characteristic of the non-realistic strategy used by Pynchon to describe the military- industrial complex. The novel works indeed on the assumption that the interlinked transnational corporations make up a network so intricate that it eludes representation. From a theoretical angle, this awareness of the radical intricacy of postmodern technology— particularly communications technology—will become central to Fredric Jameson’s discussion of postmodernity. Jameson argues that in many postmodern works technology acts as the objective correlative—the metaphor vehicle for the complexity of postmodern social relations (Postmodernism 38). Pynchon’s GR and Crying offer adequate literary illustrations of this logic. Characters in GR, including the scientists and engineers, realize that the new military-industrial complex is a “non-totalizable” field. They accordingly conclude that it cannot entirely be described by rational means. Quite logically, they resolve to explore it partly by paranormal or parapsychological strategies: the novel is crammed with references to magic and the supernatural. A famous scene of the novel shows Nazi dignitaries at a spiritualist scéance interrogating the ghost of late foreign minister Walter Rathenau. The latter was assassinated by the Nazis because he was Jewish. His ghost delivers precious wisdom about the future of the corporate economy. Likewise, the V2 rockets themselves are the object of designs that go beyond rational calculation. Weissmann, for instance, decides to build a specific rocket model—the 00000 rocket, or “Quintuple 0” rocket, equipped with the equally mysterious “S-Gerät.” At the end of the novel, we learn that this machine allowed Weismann to send his lover Gottfried, naked and wrapped in Imipolex G, into space then crashing to earth. This episode illustrates therefore the erotic identification of human subject and machine. The Schwarzkommando members also entertain enigmatic designs about the rockets: some of them seem to wish to appropriate it in order to turn it into a doomsday device—a weapon of mass suicide (they are in this sense similar to the dark side of the Tristero in Crying). Others, including Enzian, seem rather intent on imagining alternative, creative ways of using these devices. This attitude constitutes the more optimistic dimension of this otherwise pessimistic work: through different subplots, Pynchon celebrates the inventiveness of small groups or individuals, who develop a bricoleur, do-it-yourself approach to technology. These characters—the Schwarzkommando, also a band of Argentinian “gaucho-anarchists”—form what Pynchon calls the “counterforce”—the countercultural constellation that seeks to oppose the military industrial logic. Thomas Pynchon: biography 125
Figure 172: Pynchon in the 1970s.
From the perspective of literary discourse, GR, with its interwoven plots, is obviously a highly hybrid, “heteroglot” or “plurilinguistic” text. It can be said to contain several novels in one, each of them belonging to different genres. One remarkably poignant sub-plot offers a brilliant instance of psychological realism—the story of engineer Pökler, his wife and his daughter. Pökler is a weak character for whom the building of powerful rockets represents a substitute for his sense of individual inadequacy. He therefore agrees to pursue his work under Nazi supervision, even though his wife, a German communist, is sent to a concentration camp. Weissmann, Pökler’s superior at the rocket factory, uses the engineer’s daughter as blackmail bait to keep the father under his control: Pökler is allowed to see her only at long intervals The meetings take place at an amusement park, which is Pynchon’s vision of a Nazi Disneyland. However, because his daughter changes physically as she grows up, Pökler comes to wonder if she has not died in camp, and if Weismann is not using another young woman as a substitute—a young Nazi spy who would have been hired to keep tabs on him. What Pökler does not know, however, is that his daughter is all the while a prisoner of the Dora work camp, quite close to his office, and that, when he meets her, she only has to travel a few hundred meters. Another brilliant episode—comparable to a 19th-century tale of imperial discovery—focuses on Tchitcherine at the time when he worked as a Soviet official, in charge of an alphabetization program in central Asia: the Soviets wish to find a suitable Cyrillic translitteration for the central Asian languages. This project, in the allegorical framework of the novel, represents the colonization of non-industrial cultures by the industrialized powers. Pynchon draws for this on Marshall McLuhan’s reflections on the impact of printing (see The Gutenberg Galaxy). Yet, thanks to this project, Tchitcherine is able to experience a genuine epiphany: while watching a fascinating seduction dance performed by a young couple, he sees what he calls “the Kirghiz light”—an illumination that will, however, not withstand the pressure of industrial culture.
Besides its serious thematics, GR contains a sizable load of black humor and comic subversion. A lot of the comic material is introduced through surrealistic (though very cleverly structured) digressions, like the famous hallucinatory passage where Slothrop, having dropped his mouth harp in the toilet of a Black jazz café, is swallowed into the toilet bowl and the sewers At this moment, Slothrop starts hallucinating about a character named Croutchfield, the man of the West, and his relation to native Americans. The link between the toilet episode and the western vignette is a coincidental one: as Slothrop gropes for his harp, the band in the jazz café plays a song called Cherokee:
Passages like this one betray the influence of William Burroughs’s fragmented narrative method. The metafictional burlesque is, (though other readers of Pynchon might disagree) occasionally gross enough to conceal the more reflective components of the work. One rather cheesy comic device is motivated by Tyrone Slothrop’s need to find a disguise as he roams through the Zone. On one occasion, he transforms himself into Rocketman—a comic-strip figure reminiscent of Superman—by donning a Wagnerian cape and a helmet picked up in a bombed-out theater. This, way, Slothrop’s link to the rocket is signified in a comic mode. Later, he is forced to play the part of Plechazunga—a pig figure in the spring Thomas Pynchon: biography 126 festival of a Northern German village. Plechazunga wears a parti-colored pig suit and to fart abundantly. Again, one detects in this the postmodern willingness, on the one hand, to renounce the seriousness of high modernism, and, on the other, to grant the reader some space to distance him or herself from the text. Like other writers in this movement, Pynchon cannot write in a way that would make his medium transparent, invisible: this would be a sign of literary “bad faith”—a dishonest manipulation.
Figure 173: Paperback cover of Vineland. The initial cover art depicted North Californian marijuana fields being burned by the police.
2.3.2.2.6 Vineland [1990]
A more accessible work than Pynchon’s previous novels, Vineland deals with the counterculture of the 1960s and with its decline after the mid-seventies. The main characters are linked in a family configuration: Zoyd Wheeler is a former sixties surf-rock musician who commits fake acts of insanity in order to keep a disability pension. In the sixties, he was the companion of Frenesi Gates, a beautiful independent film-maker who embodies all the rebellious spirit of the flower power decade. Frenesi, however, turned into an FBI informant and disappeared—a development that expresses the ambiguities and the failure of 1960s radicalism (this is, again, similar to the darker side of the Tristero in Crying). Prairie, Zoyd’s and Frenesi’s teenage daughter, is obsessed with the personality of her vanished mother. The novel follows her efforts to locate her.
2.3.2.2.7 Mason and Dixon [1997]
Figure 174: cover of Mason & Dixon.
This novel offers a fictional rewriting of late eighteenth-century American history. It focuses on the efforts of two historical figures—Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon—who were given the mission to explore and survey the American continent west of the Appalachian Mountains. Specifically, they had to define the line separating the colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania—the line that in future decades would separate “free” from “slave” states in the US (thus, dividing North from South). Pynchon uses this premise for the development of a brilliant metahistorical romance, scrutinizing such themes as the relationship between science, developing industrialism, and colonization. Many characters in the novel are historical figures—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, etc. ... The novel consistently resorts to stylistic pastiche: it is not only written about the eighteenth century, it also adopts the diction of eighteenth-century prose.
Thomas Pynchon: biography 127
2.3.2.2.8 Against the Day [2006]
This huge metahistorical romance—more than 1200 pages in the paperback edition—revisits Pynchon’s familiar themes, using as background the period stretching from the late- nineteenth century to the First World War. The main theme in this case is what cultural historian Alan Trachtenberg calls the “incorporation of America “—the US’s shift from a country that in the early nineteenth century embodied the promise of democracy to a superpower devoted to monopoly capitalism. As in Mason & Dixon, the novel develops multiple plots, mixing historical and fictional figures. The counterforce attempting to oppose capitalists and their new technologies (railroads, electricity ...) is in this case anarchism. This allows Pynchon to describe the violent labor conflicts that characterized the US at the turn of the twentieth century. As usual, the novel contains a lot of comic elements, partly drawing on pastiche. One group of characters—the “Chums of Chance”—seems a crossbreed between heroes of late-nineteenth-century teenagers’ fiction (“dime novels”) and 1960s pop bands such as the Beach Boys. Other comic scenes depict the quasi-gothic world of late-nineteenth-century spiritualist sub-cultures.
Figure 175: cover of Against the Day.
Figure 176: cover of Inherent Vice.
2.3.2.2.9 Inherent Vice [2009]
It seemed almost inevitable that Pynchon should one day try his hand at writing a detective novel—more specifically, hard-boiled fiction à la Raymond Chandler. Hard-boiled novels indeed have a very recognizable writing style—a distinctive narrative voice, which lends itself beautifully to pastiche. They also usually focus on disappearances and conspiracies, displaying a paranoid sensibility compatible with Pynchon’s own interests. Moreover, hard-boiled novels have been used as vehicle of social criticism, as they usually depict upper-class characters reaping the benefits of economic and moral corruption. Inherent Vice—a lighter work by Pynchon’s standards—appropriates this formula and transposes it to the fictional world Pynchon had already used for Vineland— the 1960s counterculture. The main protagonist is a hippie detective investigating a suspicious disappearance—a narrative premise allowing Pynchon to express his nostalgia for the libertarian spirit of the hippie movement, but also his awareness of this movement’s political limitations.
Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 128
2.3.2.3 The Crying of Lot 49: analysis
2.3.2.3.1 Synopsis
Figure 177: Picador cover of The Crying of Lot 49.
Like Pynchon’s first novel V, Crying is a quest narrative. It focuses on protagonist Oedipa Maas’s efforts to make sense of a world that, under its everyday surfaces, displays a disquieting number of unexplainable events. In the beginning of the novel, Oedipa, a young and attractive middle-class suburban homemaker, is appointed executrix of the estate of her late former lover Pierce Inverarity. During her investigation in San Narciso—Inverarity’s Southern Californian home base—Oedipa realizes that her former lover’s holdings are tied in with the whole Californian, indeed the whole American economy—especially the real-estate and high technology sectors. Oedipa also realizes that Inverarity’s America is the home of a whole constellation of subcultural groups who communicate through an underground mail system called W.A.S.T.E. One of these groups seems to be a secret brotherhood called the Tristero, whose history develops in parallel to that of mail systems of the past, particularly the European Thurn and Taxis courier system. Most of the novel follows Oedipa as she tries to interpret the Tristero’s enigmatic manifestations—misprinted stamps, post horn symbols, garbled lines in Jacobean plays, etc... She comes to interview a whole cast of eccentric people who tell her stories relevant to the history of the secret organization. Still, the Tristero raises questions to which the novel brings no compelling answer: is the Tristero only a figment of Oedipa’s paranoid imagination? Is it really the backbone of a brotherhood of outcasts—the people Pynchon will later calls the preterites, those who have been passed over by history? Is the Tristero a positive countercultural force, aiming at the regeneration of postmodern alienation? Is it, on the contrary, a power with an evil, destructive side? The novel closes at the moment when Oedipa attends an auction at which a lot of Inverarity’s stamps—Lot 49—will be sold. The stamps might contain new clues about the Tristero. Also, Oedipa has learned that a Tristero member might be present at the auction in order to buy them. What these clues and this mysterious figure might reveal falls, however, outside of the scope of the novel: the latter ends just before Lot 49 is “cried,” i.e. put up for auction. Through this narrative, Pynchon reflects on the possibilities for cultural and political subversion within an American culture that seems doomed to conformity and inequality.
2.3.2.3.2 A James Joyce Cartoon: An Unlikely Mixture of Realism, the Mythical Method, and Metafictional Burlesque
2.3.2.3.2.1 Cartoonesque (Post)modernism
Reading The Crying of Lot 49 is a defamiliarizing experience: the text seems to contain many heterogeneous elements and seems to require heterogeneous, even incompatible strategies of interpretation. Some passages are extremely poetic. Others carry sociological reflections about America or even scholarly developments about physics and information theory. The strange mixture of theoretical reflections, burlesque comedy, and metafictional disruptions may be jarring to readers unaccustomed to Pynchon. The novel could be compared to a cartoon-like narrative that might have been written by a high modernist author—James Joyce, for instance.
Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 129
This admittedly ironical description does justice both to Crying as a text and to the literary context in which it was written. We have seen that in the mid-sixties, Pynchon could not possibly avail himself of an established postmodern tradition (see 2.3.2.2.1). Instead, his direct literary interlocutors were the modernist authors he was familiar with. To a large extent, he may have felt he was simply transposing the literary formulas of pre-WWII modernism to the postwar American context. It is indeed useful to point out to what extent Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 carries out literary and cultural agendas similar to those of a modernist classic such as James Joyce’s Ulysses [1922]:
. Like Ulysses, Crying provides a literary analysis of a contemporary cultural context. Joyce’s novel famously focuses on early-twentieth-century Dublin— the Irish writer’s world—, whereas Crying explores Pynchon’s own (sub)urban America in the mid-sixties. The ambition to explore the contemporary world is the hallmark of literary realism—a literary movement whose legacy Joyce himself would not necessarily have dismissed.
. Still, many literary strategies adopted by the two novels conspicuously differ from classic realism. In particular, Ulysses was praised—notably by modernist poet T. S. Eliot—for using what modernists called the mythical method: Ulysses establishes parallels between its contemporary plot and mythical narratives or culturally prestigious traditions of the past. We will see below that Pynchon uses this technique too. Among classical modernist authors, the mythical method is often used to contrast the deficient, decadent, alienating contemporary world with the more vital, prestigious past. To some extent, Pynchon uses the mythical method for similar effects.
. Like Ulysses, Crying features burlesque, surrealistic moments. In Joyce’s novel, the “Circe” chapter, chronicling the protagonists’ visit to a Dublin brothel is wildly surrealistic and quite comic. Yet the tenor of Pynchon’s humor is more pronouncedly burlesque than Joyce’s. Many intertextual references in Crying are allusions to comic, even ridiculous mass-culture works—cartoons (Porky Pig; the Roadrunner), light rock and roll music (the early Beatles, the Beach Boys), cheesy TV programs (e.g. The Cashiered film, featuring young Metzger). The predominance of these mass culture elements, which confer an apparent levity to the text, are typical of postmodernism, not of classical modernism. Indeed, one feels that the novel even pokes fun at the high seriousness of modernist classics. Admittedly, this type of humor may make it difficult for readers to pay attention to the serious argument developed by the novel. Yet it also constitutes the vector of Pynchon’s residual optimism: Pynchonian burlesque is energetic and energizing. Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 130
2.3.2.3.2.2 A Realist Premise? Suburbia and Its Discontents
Crying qualifies as a quasi-realist novel commenting on contemporary conditions in so far as it explores the world of suburbia and (post)modern alienation—the discontents of suburban life in the 1950s and ‘60s. The first chapter suggests indeed that the story focuses on a well- educated middle class suburban homemaker, who lives in Kinneret-among-the-pines, a (fictional) suburb of the San Francisco Bay Area. In this respect, Crying is similar to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, which also focuses on characters that enjoy the economic affluence of the postwar period yet are plagued with anxiety and repressed trauma (see 2.3.3.2).
The large-scale development of middle-class suburbs around American metropolitan centers was still a relatively recent phenomenon when Crying was published.3 At the time, the spread of suburbia constituted the latest development in a century-long process of urbanization that had been experienced very negatively by the American population and its intellectuals. According to American patterns of urbanization, suburbs are middle-class neighborhoods located outside the inner cities, typically beyond the city’s administrative limits. This class-based repartition of urban space is therefore very different from what we observe in some European cities like Paris (and, to some extent also London), where, on the contrary, suburbs (“les banlieues”) are working-class areas (Brussels follows the American pattern in this matter: its suburbs are more affluent than the city’s center). Though American suburbs appeared as early as the end of the late nineteenth century with the development of railroads (hence the term “railroad suburbs”) their spectacular growth took place right after WWII. This important social change was triggered in the first place by the necessity to find affordable housing for soldiers (GIs) returning from the conflict. The affordability of automobiles is the United States was also a determining factor, since the development of suburbia was closely linked to the building of huge road infrastructures (the California “freeways” for instance, mentioned in Crying through repeated allusions to the San Narciso freeway, were built as of the 1950s).
From a social point-of-view, suburbs constituted an environment whose homogeneity was both reassuring and stifling. They were meant to be the complete opposite of the crowded multi-ethnic cities (New York, Chicago, San Francisco) that had developed in the U.S. On the contrary, suburbs were almost exclusively middle-class and white: suburbia implied de facto segregation. There were also very clear gender barriers in the organization of suburban life: while men were supposed to commute to work every day, women (Pynchon’s Oedipa, for instance), regardless of their often significant professional training, were supposed to stay at home and raise children. The new suburbs were the hatching ground of the “baby boom” generation, the children born between 1950 and the early 1960s. As middle-class families moved to the suburbs, the downtown areas (the “inner cities”) grew ever poorer and socially disrupted. In cultural terms, suburbs were associated with the rise of television: suburban families, though scattered over large tracts of real estate, were connected to the national community by the new electronic medium.
In its first pages, Pynchon’s novel provides a dystopian representation of this new world. Under the reassuring surface of everyday rituals (the Tupperware parties; the shopping mall), we discern chronic dissatisfaction and even anxiety:
3 See Kenneth Jackson, The Crabgrass Frontier (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)for a historical account of the development of American suburbs. Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 131
P. 7 "Mucho Maas, home, bounded through the screen door. ‘Today was another defeat’"
P. 6 "... last year, at three or so in the morning there had come this long-distance call ... “4
P. 5 "The letter was from the law firm of Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus ... and signed by somebody called Metzger"
Mucho Maas finds his job frustrating (see 2.3.3.3.3.3.2.2), and Oedipa’s life is threatened by strange phone calls in the middle of the night or by unexpected mail. What lies outside the perimeter of Kinneret seems threatening. If we read Crying from this realist/psychologizing perspective, we must conclude that the novel represents a seemingly reassuring world that is about to be severely destabilized. Likewise it investigates the underlying problems—the existential and cultural void —that makes this world so fragile.
One might also discern a realist agenda in the novels’ attempt to develop more general comments about the technostructure of 1960s capitalist America. However, we will see below that Crying delivers this type of sociological commentary by means of social allegories— hence not through the traditional discourse of realism.
2.3.2.3.2.3 The Mythical Method and Its Postmodernist Subversion
Many elements indicate indeed that Crying is not comparable to more traditional postwar realist novels such as, for instance, John Updike’s Rabbit, Run [1960]. In the first place, Pynchon’s reliance on the allegorical mechanisms of the mythical method constitutes a clear departure from traditional realism.
In the narrow understanding of the term, the mythical method designates a form of intertextuality that links large segments of the contemporary plot to a well identified text or genre of the past. The whole narrative of Joyce’s Ulysses, for instance, is closely patterned on the narrative development of Homer’s Odyssey. Here are some of the elements of Crying that fit this definition of the mythical method:
— Oedipa’s name refers to the Oedipus myth. Like Sophocles’ protagonist, Oedipa embarks on a quest that leads her to investigate an enigma: Sophocles’ Oedipus confronts the Sphinx and solves her riddle; Oedipa interrogates Pierce Inverarity’s San Narciso and its mysterious Tristero subculture. Her attempts to plumb their mysteries remains unfulfilled, however.
— Kinneret, the suburb where Oepida and Mucho live, bears the Hebrew name for the Sea of Galilee. The latter setting is the place where Jesus accomplished two of his most famous miracles: the multiplication of fish and bread. Likewise, Oedipa’s Kinneret is in wait of a miracle or a revelation—the revelation of the meaning of the Tristero, for instance. Also, the ironical comparison between the American and
4 Pages references are to the 1979 Picador edition of the novel: Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 1966, London: Picador-Pan Book, 1979. Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 132
the Biblical Kinneret may also mean that the former, unlike the latter, is existentially infertile.
— The names San Narciso and Echo’s Court refer to the Narcissus myth, as it is narrated in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for instance. This is a clear reference to the narcissistic dimension of Inverarity’s America—its closure and self-absorption – (see 2.3.3.3.3.2.5.3).
— The Courier’s Tragedy creates a link between Crying and the violent world of Jacobean tragedy—plays full of conspiracies, mystery and violence.
In a looser understanding of the term, the mythical method may include the whole range of intertextual allusions triggered in Crying. The text indeed offers a dense intertextual fabric, acknowledging the influence of detective fiction (see 2.3.3.3.4.5.3.1), historical novels, writers of the American experience like Walt Whitman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Hart Crane, metafictional authors such as Jorge Luis Borges (see 2.2.1), as well as all the mass-culture sources mentioned above.
Simultaneously, one feels that Pynchon’s Crying does not always appropriate the mythical method in the highly serious spirit that characterizes modernist classics (T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land would, in this respect, be an even more appropriate example than the often comic and whimsical Joyce). Accordingly, the novel both imitates the discourse of modernism and debunks it—demystifies it. There is more than a hint of postmodernist playfulness in the way in which some of the mythical or allegorical allusions are introduced. This playfulness has a subversive, metafictional impact: it draws readers’ attention to the author’s handling of intertextuality. The subversion of the mythical method is apparent notably in Pynchon’s choice of allegorical and metafictional characters’ names.
Choosing characters’ names is, from the writer’s point-of-view, a technical problem that can be handled in different ways: a realist novelist may choose the names at random, by, for instance, looking up the telephone book, as George Simenon did for his crime novels. In this case, the characters’ names will carry only minimal information—a geographical or ethnic origin, at best. Other works (English Restoration comedies) contain characters whose names carry a transparently coded message: they are stereotypes that offer a description the character’s function or psychological make-up (Mr. Pinchwife (he pinches his wife); Mrs Lovesit (she loves it); Petulant (he is irritable); Millamant (she has hundreds of suitors) ... . Modernist writers favored characters’ names that required a more attentive form of decoding: the value of the name is less obvious; it becomes evident only if we refer it to our general understanding of the work’s thematics (Stephen Dedalus, in Joyce’s Ulysses, bears the name of Icarus’ father. In Greek mythology, Dedalus was an architect who wanted to escape a labyrinth by building wings made out of feather and wax; Joyce’s Dedalus wants to escape from the labyrinth of modern Dublin in a metaphorical way, by using the “wings” of his own poetic gift). In Crying, on the other hand, the difficulty we face when trying to interpret names is due to the fact that the novel seems to resort in turn to all of these methods, without always clearly indicating if or how names carry an allegorical meaning—whether they contain mythological allusions, particularly.
Oedipa Maas (see 2.3.3.3.2.3). On first inspection, this is a serious “mythical” name choice: Oedipa is, allegorically speaking, a quest heroine investigating a curse affecting America. Still, the name sounds eccentric. Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 133
Mucho Maas: “mucho mas” means “much more” in Spanish. Mucho indeed wants more out of life than his disappointing job (see 2.3.3.3.3.2.2). The name is significant, yet also comic.
Pierce Inverarity: this is a polysemic name, referring to several significant elements. It might be an allusion to Charles Sanders Peirce, the late-nineteenth-century inventor of semiotics. Semiotics is the study of sign systems, and signs are essential in this novel. Inverarity’s country is a territory full of enigmatic, hieroglyphic messages. Secondly, “rarity” fits Inverarity’s status as an absent figure. The name, which is similar to “Inveracity,” also amalgamates “inverted” and “veritas,” as if this character embodied a perversion of truth.
Lot 49: 1849 is the year of the big Gold Rush to California, the moment when the state was colonized by Anglo-Saxons. The term may then designate California and the whole of the United States, especially in so far as the inhabitants of this territory were obsessed with gold and money. The novel itself also suggests a second reading for this term (119):
P. 119 "By far the greatest number, however, fled to America during 1849-50 ... “
1849 is the moment when members of the Tristero system had to escape from the aftermath of failed European liberal revolutions and had to emigrate to the United States. In this sense, 49 would refer to a year that offered a new beginning for countercultural dissidents, even though this promise may have been frustrated.
Mike Fallopian: the Fallopian tubes are horn-shaped canals leading from the ovary to the uterus. The name might refer to the Tristero post horn. Oedipa indeed discovers the Tristero’s muted horn right after encountering Fallopian. Also, this name might refer to fertility or the lack of it: the huge conspiracy theory is generated after Fallopian appears in the novel. Several passages suggest that Oedipa herself carries the Tristero revelation as if she were pregnant with it, leaving us to wonder whether the discovery triggered by Fallopian may be (in)fertile.
John Nefastis: the name evokes the epithet “nefarious.” This word is etymologically composed of “ne” + “fas,” meaning “against divine law.” Nefastis builds a machine meant to reverse the course of physical laws: he wants to reduce entropy—the degree of disorder—of physical systems, which is scientifically impossible. The negative connotation of the name suggests that he is also tied to the destructive side of the Tristero (the “brute Other”) (see 2.3.3.3.3.2.7 and 2.3.3.3.4.4.2).
Genghis Cohen: the name of ruthless conqueror Genghis Khan is given to a rather unimpressive stamp collector. There is an ironical contrast in this, though the name, with its imperial connotations, might also point to the destructive potential of the Tristero dissenters.
Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 134
John Scurvham: evokes the disease scurvy; as such, the term connotes the “brute Other"—the violent side of the Tristero conspiracy.
Randolph Dribblette: as an actor, he is likely to spit out dribblets (this is admittedly a lame joke; Pynchon is not above this kind of sophomoric humor). Dribblette is also described as a theatrical director who plays around with the meaning of a manuscript—in this case, the Jacobean play The Courier’s Tragedy. Thus, he plays with it in the same way as a soccer player dribbles a ball. Still, can we assume that Pynchon, an American, might make references to soccer, a game that was not very popular in 1960s America?
Diocletian Blobb: evokes a blob, which is definitely a negative characterization (weakness, formlessness).
Metzger: the name means “butcher” in German. Does he deserve this description? He is macho, but hardly a killer. On the other hand, this patronym does exist in Germany and the U.S. Could this be merely a “realist” name à la Simenon?
KCUF: “fuck” spelt backwards. Mucho, a KCUF employee feels cheated by the radio station. Pynchon’s humor is often sophomoric—similar to jokes (supposedly) favored by college students.
Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus. Pynchon pokes fun at the custom according to which law firms take their names from their numerous partners. “Warpe” (to bend) and “Wistfull” (melancholic) might characterize these lawyers’ personalities, yet we are not given any opportunity to find this out since these characters never appear in the manuscript. Charles Mingus is a famous jazz musician, to whom Pynchon might want to pay homage in passing.
Readers faced with these eccentric names must try to discern in them a symbolic message relevant to the plot but can never be sure that this kind of encoding was intended by the writer. In this sense, these names initiate a metafictional game between the writer and his readers: the text playfully encourages us to ask ourselves whether or not we should keep looking for hidden meanings. Interestingly, Pynchon’s choice of patronyms places us in the same situation as Oedipa toward the Tristero: the heroine’s despair is indeed brought about by the fact that she is unable to decide whether the Tristero is real, whether it is only a fiction invented by people who conspire against her, or whether it is a pure product of her own paranoia (see 2.3.3.3.4.5.2).
P. 118 "Or you are fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut ... Those (hypotheses), now that she was looking at them, she saw to be the alternatives ..." Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 135
2.3.2.3.3 A Literary Map of Techno-Consumerist America
2.3.2.3.3.1: Pynchon and the ‘Great American Novel’
Even though Pynchon may tease his readers by making fun of their propensity to read meaning into every detail of his text, there is no doubt that, in general terms, the incidents depicted in Crying should be read as allegorical statements that concern not only a limited set of characters in 1960s California but the whole of the United States—or even the whole of postmodern culture. This allegorical dimension is immediately visible in the inheritance narrative introduced in the very first paragraph of the novel.
P. 5 "... Oedipa had been named executor .... of one Pierce Inverarity ..."
P. 25 "‘Inverarity owned that too.’"
P. 117 "...the Tristero could be traced back to Inverarity’s estate."
P. 124 "That America coded in Inverarity’s testament, whose was that?"
These passages indicate that Inverarity is an allegorical figure of American capitalism, with investments branching off in all directions—real estate, military technology, mafia connections, etc. As an executor of Inverarity’s estate, Oedipa will be in a position, allegorically speaking, to evaluate the state of American capitalism—the situation of the ‘land of the free’ in the post-WWII period.
There is something specifically American in the allegorical dimension of Pynchon’s novel. Like many other US novelists before him—James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald—, Thomas Pynchon writes works that may aspire to the status of what is sometimes called “The Great American Novel.” Characteristically, the blurb on the paperback edition of Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon [1997] reads: “If anyone is still looking for the Great American Novel ... then this may well be it.” This means that Pynchon is expected to comment on the very nature of American history and on the values the U.S. stands for. This need to (re)define the meaning of one’s own national experience is less common in European letters, possibly because Europeans tend to take their sense of nationhood for granted.
In other words, Pynchon’s allegorical narratives set out to address what Lyotard might call the “grand narrative” of America—the ideological presuppositions that define the U.S. For white Euro-Americans like Pynchon, this narrative of legitimization revolves around some key terms, all of them related to the colonization of the North-American continent: the “American Dream,” “manifest destiny,” the “land of the free,” the “frontier” or the “wilderness.” These terms imply that European settlers in America had taken upon themselves the specific mission of establishing a free society on the continent discovered by Columbus—a New World liberated from the tyranny and the overcrowding of Europe. This narrative is deeply ideological in that it served as an alibi for colonization and, notably, for the expulsion and sometimes extermination of Native Americans. Thus, it is a narrative devised by white settlers for their own sake: the experience of Black Americans, Mexican- Americans or Asian-Americans cannot be narrated along those lines. Characteristically, many American writers have been critical of the political uses to which the manifest destiny was put (racism, colonization). The example of Pynchon shows that this critique of American Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 136 values often takes the form of the acknowledgment that the initial promise of creating a land of the free has not been fulfilled. This means that the original American dream was a legitimate one, but that it has been betrayed. In Crying, the function of the Tristero narrative, which depicts a conspiracy of outcasts and rebels, is indeed to determine to what extent America has failed in its utopian promise: why have people been relegated to the sidelines, and why is there no spiritual fulfilment in this capitalist environment.
2.3.2.3.3.2 Allegorical Snapshots of Inverarity’s Estate
2.3.2.3.3.2.1 A Catalogue of Subject Positions
If Crying, despite its relatively short length, is meant to serve a new version of the “great American novel,” Pynchon’s text does not accomplish this task by offering a unified narrative of the American experience. Instead, the novel offers a plurality of allegorical snapshots— scenes or vignettes that represent the situation of a whole country from different perspectives (typically, from Oedipa’s and Mucho’s point-of-view, at different stages of their evolutions as characters). In this way, each of these snapshots defines one particular attitude, one specific way of positioning oneself toward the postmodern information economy. In other words, they define a set of subject positions. Unexpectedly, perhaps, the fact that these allegorical vignettes offer contrasted judgments on American culture will make it difficult for us to determine whether Crying is purely and simply a dystopian text, or whether it still entertains hope about contemporary society. The novel’s judgment about Inverarity’s America is, literally, suspended, since the novel is given an open ending (Oedipa is still waiting for a revelation when the text closes).
Accordingly, we will review in turn several snapshots or vignettes that construct the characters’ subject positions toward their environment, as well as other passages of related interest:
. Mucho’s ‘car-lot nightmare’ (pp. 7-8), which offers a thoroughly dystopian vision of postmodern capitalism.
— Mucho’s ‘Muzak revelation’ (pp. 97-98), which offers a surprisingly euphoric description of postmodern culture.
— The pensive girl in the tower: Oedipa’s vision of herself as a Rapunzel-like figure, leading to her reminiscences of Remedios Varo’s painting Bordando el Manto Terrestre.
— Oedipa’s San Narciso’s epiphany (pp. 14-16), in which (among other things) the heroine wonders if it might be possible to know the hidden truths of the postmodern city.
— The novel’s allusion to the “unimaginable Pacific” (pp. 36-37), leading to reflections on the status of nature in contemporary society.
— Oedipa’s night-time drifting (pp. 80-90), where the heroine experiences what we might call ‘semiotic ecstasy:’ in an apparent fit of paranoid delirium, she has the feeling that the city is obsessively trying to convey to her the hidden truths that she seeks. Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 137
— Oedipa’s musings about apocalypse and internal exile (pp 124-26), where the heroine wonders what attitude she could ultimately adopt toward postmodern America. Would it be possible to escape from this environment altogether by being granted a final, apocalyptic revelation that would annihilate the alienated society? Or is it possible to live within postmodern America like an internal exile, without surrendering to its power structure.
— The crying of lot 49: during the auction scene at the end of the novel, Oedipa is still looking forward to a revelation, though she has learned to distrust whatever might be revealed.
This list suggests that, even though the novel, does not delve very deep into psychological analysis, it does resort to characterization by contrast. In particular, there is a striking difference between Oedipa and her husband. We will see in more detail below that, for Mucho, defining oneself with regard to the culture of capitalist America implies an all-or- nothing attitude: this world is either all bad (the car-lot nightmare) or all good (the Muzak revelation). The subject positions adopted by Oedipa toward San Narciso are, on the contrary, more nuanced, more complex. Oedipa appears as a contemplative personality who wants to decipher secret meanings beyond what she sees. She is looking for a transcendent revelation—an epiphany that emanates from a deeper level of being.
2.3.2.3.3.2.2 Mucho’s Car-Lot Nightmare.
P. 7-8: "Today was another defeat” (7)
« ... the actual residues of those lives ... like a salad of despair, in a grey dressing of ash ... like an endless ritual of trade-ins” ... To Mucho, it was horrible. Endless, convoluted incest” (8)
This passage reports Mucho Maas’s horrific reminiscences of his former job as a secondhand-car salesman. For convenience’s sake, let us call it ‘Mucho’s car-lot nightmare.’ These lines offer what is arguably the most pessimistic view of Inverarity’s America. They express Mucho’s negative assessment of the logic of American capitalism. From Oedipa’s husband’s point-of-view, the market economy takes the form of an endless exchange in which people are turned into objects (cars) and into information (the pieces of junk that tell the stories of their lives). The horror described in the passage may therefore be attributed to the process that Marxist theoreticians call reification—the fact of transforming social relations among people into an exchange of commodities, a traffic of things (to make things simple, reification means that people are reduced to the status of objects). For instance, in the logic of reification, people may identify with the products that they buy: there are Renault Twingo persons and BMW persons; when these two kinds of people interact, we do not witness a dialogue between human beings but rather a confrontation between two brand names and between the ideology associated with them. In Crying, people are not only turned into things, but their very inner lives—their memories, their whole story—are transformed into signs that can be exchanged on the market.
The specific pessimism of this passage is also due to the idea that this economic field is a closed system: according to Pynchon’s metaphor, it follows an Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 138
incestual logic; it is a traffic oriented inward, with no prospect of escape. Also, the process of exchange unfolds in an atmosphere of increasing penury and disorder: the information and the signs caught up in this cycle are progressively worn out, depreciated. One notices here Pynchon’s fascination for the scientific concept of entropy—the principle according to which the energy of physical systems irremediably evolves toward an ever increasing state of disorder.5 In psychoanalytical terms, one might also argue that the passage expresses a fear of engulfment. We sense that Mucho is afraid of being absorbed by the economic traffic that takes place in the car lot. It is as if he were afraid of losing his own self, of seeing his own personality disseminated through the market in the form of little pieces of junk. It is this powerful anxiety that seems to explain why the car lot obsession is a recurring theme in Mucho’s nightmares.
There are interesting similarities between Pynchon’s allegorical depiction of the American economy, and a famous passage in F. Scott’s Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby, depicting an allegorical ‘valley of ashes’ in the outskirts of New York. The desolate landscape, with its ghost-like figures, is an allegory of the alienated city. The critical import of the passage is evident:
ABOUT half-way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes — a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic — their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.
(F.Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby [1925])
5 For discussion of the concept in entropy in Pynchon’s fiction, see Anne Mangel’s "Maxwell’s Demon, Entropy, Information," in George Levine and David Leverenz’s Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1976), 77-100, as well as Katherine Hayles’s "A Metaphor of God Knows How Many Parts," in Patrick O’Donnell, ed., New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 139
Pynchon’s depiction of Mucho’s car lot qualifies as an historically updated version of Fitzgerald’s vision of capitalism. The “ash-grey men” in Fitzgerald’s texts are obviously proletarians, brutalized by back-breaking manual work. In Pynchon, on the contrary, economic horror is located in the field of trade—in the mechanism of exchange. This reflects the evolution of industrialized countries between the 1920s and the 1960s: while manual labor was previously regarded as the main source of wealth, in the postwar period, trade, exchange, speculation, and the information economy became dominant.
2.3.2.3.3.2.3 Mucho’s Muzak Revelation
P. 97-99 "(Mucho) is losing his identity ... (He) is less himself and more generic ... (There is a) serenity about him (Oedipa) had never seen” (97).
"(Mucho) was talking about the Muzak ... synthetic ... I (= Mucho) can break down chords ... into all the basic frequencies and harmonics ... dispens(ing) with live musicians” (98).
"Everybody who says the same words is the same person ... vision of consensus” (99)
This second passage—let’s call it Mucho’s “Muzak revelation”—reads like the exact opposite of the car-lot nightmare. What is being revealed to Mucho, in this case, is the pleasure of surrendering one’s own self to mass culture. Indeed, at this point, Mucho seems to have undergone a metamorphosis: he does not seem at all feel threatened by the cultural artefacts of capitalism. On the contrary, he seems to use them as a source of sensual fascination—a pleasure enhanced by his use of hallucinogens (LSD: at this stage, Pynchon is clearly not enthusiastic about pre-hippie drugs use). In this euphoria, Mucho’s previous fear of engulfment seems to have been entirely reversed: there is some strange delight in letting oneself be immersed into the new culture. The fact that this form of immersion should lead to the loss of one’s identity—Mucho becomes ever more generic as a person, i.e., he loses all mark of individuality—no longer seems to be a problem to the character.
Indeed, the object of Mucho’s fascination is in this case Muzak—mass- produced music for restaurants, supermarkets, office spaces or elevators. This makes the whole scene both comic and alarming. What Mucho seems to enjoy is in fact the very impersonality of this music. Muzak is the ultimate example of a non-artistic, non-authentic cultural commodity, seemingly produced without any intervention of a creative subject. Thus, the ‘Muzak revelation’ suggests that some people (here, Mucho on drugs) may find it pleasurable to live in a culture where identity is erased.
The image of postmodern selfhood that emerges from this passage is therefore that of a subject that has lost any authentic singularity, any unique distinguishing feature. When the new Mucho walks into a room, it is as if he were several people at the same time. By the end of the passage, we learn also that, if identity is bracketed off, it becomes very easy to create a form of consensus in society, because people become mere puppets of their own culture. Indeed, Mucho argues that when different people utter the same words, they become the same person. He means thereby that non-individualised subjects are entirely determined by the cultural discourses that Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 140
surround them—discourses that they help reproduce as they speak. The subject does not speak, it is spoken by its own language. Paradoxically, this is a process that Mucho finds exhilarating.
2.3.2.3.3.2.4 The Pensive Girl in the Tower: Oedipa’s Reminiscences of Rapunzel and Remedios Varo’s Painting
Figure 178: The prince gazing up at Rapunzel’s tower.
The two previous passages share the negative characteristic of delineating a closed subject position: they depict Mucho as a subject imprisoned in the capitalist economy. That imprisonment should take the form of an ecstatic trance in the second case makes little difference. Closure, imprisonment, incest, narcissism are recurrent motifs in Crying, and they all express the hopelessness of contemporary society. At the end of chapter 1 (13-14) the novel offers what may be regarded as the feminine version of this sense of imprisonment. Oedipa, when thinking of her affair with Inverarity, sees herself a “Rapunzel-like figure” (13). Rapunzel, a young woman with long blond hair, is the protagonist of a fairy tale by the Grimm brothers. She has been shut up in a tower by an evil enchantress. Her lover—a prince seduced by her singing—can only reach her by climbing the tower, using her long hair as an alpinist’s rope. Transposed to Oedipa’s situation, the fairy tale implies that she is a prisoner of her situation as a middle-class young woman, and she expects Inverarity to act as her liberating prince charming (Oedipa, in typically Pynchonian fashion, goes on to imagine cartoonesque developments to the fairy tale). In this respect, Pynchon uses the Rapunzel intertext in order to depict a situation American feminist Betty Friedan deplored in her highly influential The Feminine Mystique [1963]: the fact that well-educated American women were shut up in the suburban family sphere.
Figure 179: Remedios Varo’s Bordando el manto terrestre
The Rapunzel image then shifts to a second reminiscence, with a similar, though even more disquieting import. Oedipa remembers a painting by Spanish- Mexican surrealist artist Remedios Varo—a canvas she saw while in Mexico with Inverarity. The canvas, entitled Bordando el Manto Terrestre [“spinning the terrestrial mantle”], depicts women shut up in a tower, spinning a tapestry that flows through slits in the wall. The tapestry not only represents the world, but fuses with the landscape itself, as if the women in the tower were indeed “spinning the terrestrial mantle” itself. The pessimistic tenor of this image resides in the fact that it seems to exclude any possibility of escape whatsoever. The world itself is created from within the prison Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 141
tower. There is no significant difference between the cloistered universe inside and the deceptively free landscape outside.
Both the painting and Pynchon’s appropriation of it in Crying have a clear relevance for postmodern culture. They evoke the image of a world that is entirely encoded, programmed by human beings. The vision is in this respect similar to Borges’s description of the book world of “The Library of Babel,” which consists entirely of texts (see 2.2.1.3.2.2). Jean Baudrillard, in Simulacra and Simulation, in a comment about another story by Borges, has pointed out that such a linguistically (or “semiotically”) encoded world is bound to be a closed system: it offers no access to anything radically different from its semiotic texture, no pathway to something absolutely real. Whatever its theoretical implications, the psychological value of the ‘girl in the tower” passage in Crying is clear: in the beginning of the novel, Oedipa cannot envisage any opening to a freer existence: even her fantasies of romance (the affair with Inverarity, her prince charming), are only stories spun from the alienating world inside Rapunzel’s or Remedio Varo’s tower.
2.3.2.3.3.2.5 Oedipa’s San Narciso Epiphany
2.3.2.3.3.2.5.1 Cities in the Semblance of Electronic Circuitry
P. 14-15 "San Narciso lay farther south ... a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning ... words were being spoken ... religious instant ..."
This fourth allegorical snapshot—let us call it the ‘San Narciso epiphany’— constitutes the key moment of the novel. In general terms, it represents a landmark in the history of the literary representation of the American city. Indeed, in these lines, Pynchon offers very suggestive comments on postmodern urban space—particularly on the way in which contemporary urban communities relate to technology, to information and to nature. Also, from a narrative point-of-view, this is the moment when Pynchon discreetly introduces into the text the issue that will keep the story going until the very last page—the Tristero conspiracy. This conspiracy narrative, which is at this point not yet mentioned by name, constitutes indeed the answer— however blurred and inconclusive—to the questions that arise in Oedipa’s mind as she interrogates the seemingly closed urban landscape that constitutes her world.
Figures 170-83: a printed electronic circuit board; the sprawl of American suburbia, crossed by a freeway; components of a computer motherboard; downtown high-rises and city grid.
Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 142
At the literal level, the passage mentioned above describes Oedipa’s first impressions of San Narciso, the location of Inverarity’s corporate headquarters. San Narciso stands as the very symbol of postmodern cities in the novel—an idea evoked by the fact that “San Narciso” is a quasi-anagram of San Francisco. Thus, it is as if Inverarity’s town were the hidden side of an actual American city—Oedipa’s city, in fact. As she gazes at the San Narciso landscape, Oedipa notices that the pattern of streets in front of her resembles an electronic device—in fact a printed circuit of the kind found in transistor radios. (Transistors were new at the time; similar, far more miniaturized circuits of the same type are used in computers today.) At first, Oedipa perceives this encoded landscape as just another closed system: San Narciso is indeed, as its name reveals, narcissistic; it seems exclusively concerned with its own hieroglyphics. Yet Oedipa also feels that the urban landscape is discreetly addressing her, as if it were attempting to transmit some form of religious revelation. Yet the epiphany remains wordless, as if it were broadcast ‘on another frequency,’ or in an idiom that Oedipa does not understand. The scene is, of course, deliberately enigmatic. On the one hand, the visual correspondence between the street pattern of a suburb and the metal labyrinth of a printed circuit is quite striking [figs. 179-82]. Yet it seems much more difficult to determine the reason why Oedipa, once she has recognized this graphic correspondence, should be the beneficiary of a quasi-religious illumination—indeed of an epiphany of the type celebrated by modernist writers (see 1.2.3.2.2.2). The difficulty is heightened by the fact that the revelation thus produced remains undecipherable—indeed to the very end of the narrative. In fact, in order to interpret Oedipa’s epiphany, we will have review to most of the central issues of the novel. Here is a brief survey of the themes that are announced in this passage, and that are discussed in more detail below:
. The disappearance of nature: San Narciso’s urban and technological environment is so closed in upon itself that it seems to preclude any contact with a natural world. San Narciso’s closure is, of course, connoted by the suburb’s very name, which refers to the mythological figure of Narcissus, the young man doomed to be in love with himself (see 2.3.3.3.3.2.5.3)
. Nostalgia for lost origins and absolute meaning: the disappearance of nature implies the loss of a world of origins, the loss of an authentic past and the impossibility of probing the philosophical significance of the urban world. Yet the inhabitants of San Narciso experience nostalgia for this vanished world and for wisdom rooted in a bedrock of meaning (see 2.3.3.3.3.2.5.3). Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 143
. The threats of endless conformity and the marginalization of dissent: the closed domain of San Narciso seems to exclude the possibility of a genuine cultural or political opposition. Yet evidence of dissent keeps manifesting itself in San Narciso. Oedipa does feel the presence of a possible revelation that might break San Narciso’s conformity. This is the origin of the Tristero story (2.3.3.3.4.1).
. Postmodern magic and romance: there is a slight atmosphere of magic in the description of Oedipa’s epiphany. We are, after all, witnessing a character who hears mysterious voices. The fact that the San Narciso landscape may appear as vaguely magical raises ideological issues: is Pynchon criticizing or celebrating the urban scene that he portrays?
2.3.2.3.3.2.5.2 The Disappearance of Nature
The first thing that Oedipa notices about San Narciso is the fact that the city seems to have been built according to human designs, albeit not very concrete ones: it is “less an identifiable city than a group of concepts” (14)—real-estate or speculation schemes, particularly. In other words, San Narciso looks like an artificial entity. Yet other elements in the passage seem to subvert this initial remark. Arguing that the city is artificial implies that it can be contrasted with nature. However, nature seems to have disappeared altogether from the San Narciso landscape, or, more accurately, it seems to have been absorbed by the city, to have merged with it. Pynchon’s metaphorical language indicates that the city is like a “well-tended crop” (récolte), springing from “the dull brown earth” (14). We must therefore conclude that San Narciso is so artificial that it has become quasi-natural. The very features of its landscape—its origin in the earth, as well as its resemblance with a printed circuit— indicate that San Narciso merges the attributes of nature (the earth), the city and information technology. Thus, there no longer seems to be any room for Nature as an autonomous entity—no field that would be exterior to the all-encompassing urban sprawl. In this respect too, the landscape that Oedipa discovers in San Narciso displays the attributes of a closed system: as it absorbs everything into itself, it seems to exclude the possibility that things might exist outside of itself . Pynchon’s description of San Narciso’s paradoxical relation to nature must be interpreted within the framework of a long-established debate within American culture on the respective value of natural and urban landscapes. As of the eighteenth century, a whole tradition of American authors, intellectuals, and politicians have indeed argued that urbanization would be a curse for the New World. Indeed, even though we now often regard the U.S. as the epitome of urban-industrialism, the national utopia of the American republic was wedded to an agrarian, pastoral, anti- urban view of society. This agrarian outlook was characteristic of a pre-industrial culture in which farming was regarded as the only genuine source of wealth (the latter principle was central to 18th-c. economic theory, notably the French “Physiocrats”). What prompted the early European settlers’ enthusiasm about the New World was the immensity of the natural landscape. To them, the new continent Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 144
was a “Virgin Land”6 that lay open to colonization at the hands of farmers from the Old World (symptomatically, the notion of virgin land implies, erroneously, that the continent was devoid of any human presence). This view implies that America should remain an agrarian nation, and that the creation of an urban-industrial culture would corrupt this new paradise.
One of the most vocal of the anti-urban ideologues was President Thomas Jefferson (early 19th c.), who wrote that cities were “a cancer on the body politic.” In his view, urban civilization always carried a corrupting influence because city- dwellers can never achieve economic or moral autonomy. Unlike farmers, who grow their own food on their own plot of land, city people are dependent on other people for their subsistence. This situation of dependence is, according to Jefferson, antithetical to the dignity of individuals: it may lead, for instance, to a polity where voters can be bought off by rich people. Jefferson’s dream was based on the presupposition that the very vastness of the continent would allow all immigrants/colonizers to find a plot of land, and therefore to be able to stand as free citizens. Indeed, all through the 19th c., U.S. history was characterized by the progression of the “frontier"7—the dividing line between territories settled by European and the “wilderness,” where the Native Americans roam. The best-known nineteenth-century writers who voiced the utopia of the frontier are novelist James Fenimore Cooper and poet Walt Whitman. Cooper provides a romanticized account of early-nineteenth-century pioneers living on the frontier (that is, at that time, in the midwestern “prairie"). Whitman’s romantic poetry envisages the American continent as a site where all people could life in freedom and brotherhood:
Interlink’d, food-yielding lands! Land of coal and iron! land of gold! land of cotton, sugar, rice! Land of wheat, beef, pork! land of wool ahd hemp! land of the apple and the grape! Land of the pastoral plains, the grass-fields of the world! land of those sweet-aird interminable plateaus! Land of the herd, the garden, the healthy house of adobie! Lands where the north-west Columbia winds, and where the southwest Colorado winds! Land of the eastern Chesapeake! land of theDelaware! Land of Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan! Land of the Old Thirteen! Massachusetts land! land of Vermont and Connecticut! Land of the ocean shores! land of sierras and peaks! Land of boatmen and sailors! fishermen’s land! Inextricable lands! the clutch’d together! the passionate ones! (Walt Whitman, From Leaves of Grass [1850s])
In the long catalogues characteristic of Whitman’s poetry, nature and city merge into an harmonious, open-ended whole. Such catalogues can be contrasted with the enumeration of worn-out commodities that appears in Pynchon’s description of
6 Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970); Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Louisiana; Morton and Lucia White, The Intellectual vs. The City: from Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973). 7 In 1892, Fredric Jackson Turner, in a lecture entitled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History"—powerfully pointed out the importance of the frontier—as well as the impact of its disappearance—on the development of American culture. Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 145
Mucho Maas’s car-lot nightmare (see 2.3.3.3.3.2.2). The passage indeed deliberately inverts the logic of Whitman’s pastoral optimism—the commodities are a “salad” of consumerist “despair.”
In the late-19th century, however, the frontier reached the Pacific coast and colonization came to a stop. This is also the moment when industrialization and urbanization experienced a rapid growth. Still, even when the country became predominantly urban, the agrarian individualism derived from Jefferson and the pastoralist writers remained an influential ideological model. Its impact in the twentieth century is noticeable in the fact that American culture contains a resilient anti-urban strain: contrary to the European utopia of urban civility (Paris, ville lumière) cities in America are generally suspected of being evil, corrupting places, beyond redemption. The pressure of anti-urban ideology can be traced in American writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald (see 2.3.2.3.3.2.2) and indeed in Pynchon himself.
Predictably, Pynchon’s San Narciso, exhibits similarities with the visions of urban space elaborated by theoreticians of postmodernism. The concept of the death of nature, particularly, is a central element in Jean Baudrillard’s discussion of postmodern capitalism. In his influential essay Simulacres et simulations [1981] Baudrillard illustrates this idea by mentioning a story by Borges. In the Argentinean writer’s narrative, an emperor commissions a crew of geographers to draw a map of his territories. Strangely, the emperor wants the map to be elaborated according to a one-to-one scale, which means that the map will be exactly as large as the territory itself. Several years after the project is completed, the geographers realize that the map has started rotting away. To their surprise, they discover that the ground that had been covered over by their own chart has now disappeared: instead of inhabiting a real country, they have for some time been living only in a paper world, as it were— measuring their lives by means of the coordinates they had themselves drawn up (2.3.3.3.3.2.4). Baudrillard argues that Borges’s parable applies to the postmodern condition. He believes that we inhabit a world of discourse, of codes—a semiotic constellation that encompasses so many things that it does not seem to have any exteriority, any outer boundary. In this logic, what makes the elements of this constellation meaningful can no longer be their relation to something outside of the system. They cannot avail themselves of an anchorage in an absolute ground of meaning like God, history, reason or the instinctual world.
In Amérique [1986], Baudrillard reformulates the concept of the death of nature by commenting on the similarities between the American desert, American cities and postmodern language. Baudrillard’s argument is reminiscent of Pynchon because it implies that it is no longer possible to separate these formerly distinct realms of experience. Nature as such has dissolved. Indeed, for Baudrillard, the ‘mesas’—the huge rock formations of the desert8—are interchangeable not only with a city’s skyscrapers, but also with language itself: they look like the gigantic signs of a non-human language. Like San Narciso, a landscape of this type seems to speak to us—albeit in a language that we cannot understand. Baudrillard’s discussion is
8 Think of John Ford’s westerns, many of which are shot against the background of the huge mesas of Monument Valley, Utah. Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 146
characteristic of an aesthetic that has sometimes be called the ‘postmodern sublime’— the fascination exerted by the magnitude and intricacy of postmodern social space.9
J’ai cherché l’Amérique sidérale, celle de la liberté vaine et absolue des freeways, jamais celle du social et de la culture — celle de la vitesse désertique, des motels et des surfaces minérales, jamais l’Amérique profonde des mœurs et des mentalités. J’ai cherché dans la vitesse du scénario, dans le réflexe indifférent de la télévision, dans le film des jours et des nuits à travers un espace vide, dans la succession merveilleusement sans affect des signes, des images, des visages, des actes rituels de la route, ce qui est le plus proche de l’univers nucléaire et énucléé qui est virtuellement le nôtre jusque dans les chaumières européennes. J’ai cherché la catastrophe future et révolue du social dans la géologie, dans ce retournement de la profondeur dont témoignent les espaces striés, les reliefs de sel et de pierre, les canyons où descend la rivière fossile, l abîme immémorial de lenteur que sont 1’érosion ou la géologie jusquc dans la verticalité des mégalopoles. (Jean Baudrillard, Amérique [1986])
In this passage, the American desert is implicitly assimilated to a megalopolis—the desert is the truth of the postmodern city. Simultaneously the rock formations of the desert (the city) are viewed as the hieroglyphic signs of a non-human language. Contrary to the ‘valley of ashes’ vistas of Fitzgerald and Pynchon, this mysterious landscape inspires a quasi-religious fascination.).
2.3.2.3.3.2.5.3 Nostalgia
P. 36 "The unimaginable Pacific"
While San Narciso tends to erase anything outside of itself, its inhabitants cannot help feeling a strong nostalgia for the realms of experienced that are thus silenced. For instance, as Oedipa drives toward Lake Inverarity, she feels the presence of the ocean “lurking” beyond the endless front of wooden houses. This hidden presence lends a more vital connotation—"an arrogance and a bite” (36)—to the suburban landscape, which is built up as far as Oedipa can see. The heroine even believes that the sea could offer some form of “redemption for Southern California” (37)—that “no matter what you do to its edges,” it remains “inviolate” (37). However, this primal sea, which is the origin of all life, cannot be represented explicitly in the text—or in San Narciso: it remains something people cannot “hear, nor even smell” (37), or at best an “arid hope” (37). As such, the sea becomes a “monument to ... exile” (37)—an element that underlines the characters’ loss of genuine origins. They are doomed to live in an environment whose mode of existence is that of an enigmatic ‘second nature’ (neither artificial or natural).
P. 16 "Echo’s Courts"
Nostalgia is a key element in Pynchon’s use of the Greek myth of Narcissus and Echo. By calling Inverarity’s headquarters San Narciso, Pynchon resorts to the Joycean mythical method: he interweaves the story of Oedipa Maas with the ancient mythical figures whose plight was famously narrated in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
9 Jameson, Postmodernism, 35; Joseph Tabbi, The Postmodern sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 147
Narcissus in Ovid is a beautiful young man who is doomed to fall in love with his own reflection—hence, with himself (Ovid, Metaorphoses Book III). His love follows a closed circuit, in the same way as San Narciso seems doomed to self-absorption. The nymph Echo, who appears in several guises in Crying, is unfortunate enough to fall in love with Narcissus. Her affections are of course unrequited. She therefore takes refuge in the woods and started withering away physically. After some time, all that is left of her was her bones and her voice, which speaks only when it was addressed (hence the modern meaning of the term ‘echo’).
The figure of Echo is linked to several elements of Crying. In one possible reading, Oedipa is Echo herself: she is the character who will be waiting for San Narciso to speak. This is suggested in the fact that Oedipa, during her stay in San Narciso resides at the Echo’s Court motel. Characteristically, the metal figure that serves as advertisement for the motel resembles the heroine herself:
Figure 184: Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell in Billy Wilder’s The Seven-Year Itch. The sign advertising Pynchon’s Echo Courts is inspired from this iconic image of Monroe.
Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 148
P. 16 "The face of the nymph was much like Oedipa’s ..." Also, we might think that the discreet voice that haunts San Narciso—the “slow whirlwind” (16) of words—belongs to the lost figure of Echo: it is the voice of the love-crossed young woman who chooses to retreat to a secret place because Narcissus would not acknowledge her. There is therefore a wistful warning in this passage: Oedipa, as a reincarnation of Echo, seems bound to be frustrated in her search and in her affections. The revelation that she seeks is symbolized by the voice of a mythical figure that has always already disappeared.
P. 68 "As if their home cemeteries ... still did exist ... in a land where you could somehow walk and not need the East San Narciso freeway"
The novel, in its intricate web of allusions, connects the nostalgia for the vanished presence of Echo to a complex thematics of (impossible) death and burial. In the classical myth, when the nymph withers away, all that is left of her, besides her voice, are her bones. In Crying, however, bones do not enjoy the respect that is traditionally given to the dead: they either enigmatically disappear or are the object of illegal traffics: the GI’s skeletons buried under Lake Inverarity have been sold by mafia- connected businessmen in order to be processed into charcoal (40). The relevance of this subplot to the thematics of nostalgia can be made visible if we consider that nostalgia, according to its Greek etymology means precisely ‘desire for one’s homeplace.’ The story of the vanished bones implies therefore that, in the ‘second nature’ of San Narciso, the dead cannot return to nature: they are deprived of a permanent resting place, of restitution to their place of origins. Metzger explains indeed that, as the San Narciso expressways develop, “(o)ld cemeteries have to be ripped up” (41). The bones that were buried there, like Echo’s own remains, are granted a paradoxical mode of existence in San Narciso: they act as a ghostly presence. This suggests metaphorically that people living in San Narciso are condemned to a state of ‘death-in-life.’ They are like zombies who are prevented from reaching the world of the dead and have to remain among the living. Conversely, the living are haunted by a diffuse nostalgia for these forgotten beings.
The interlocking themes of the death of nature, nostalgia and death-in-life are alluded to in Oedipa’s first conversation with Genghis Cohen. In this poetic passage, Cohen offers the heroine a glass of dandelion wine, and remarks that the beverage goes through a process of fermentation every spring. He explains the phenomenon by suggesting that the flowers, now dead, seem to nostalgically re-enact the seasonal cycle: they go through a process of rebirth within the bottle “(a)s if they remembered” the call of Nature (68). Oedipa interprets the incident more pessimistically. She reflects that the flowers seem to mistakenly assume that Nature—their “home cemetery"—still exists, and that “bones still could rest in peace” (68) within it. But in San Narciso, Nature—both a place of origins and of final destination—has disappeared, and so have the dead. The form of nostalgia expressed by the flowers might therefore be pointless. Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 149
2.3.2.3.3.2.5.4 The Marginalization of Dissent.
Pynchon’s suggestion that the urban-industrial world is closed in upon itself, and that it has absorbed all that is exterior to itself—Nature, particularly—has important political consequences. What is at stake here is indeed the marginalization of radical dissent, the disappearance of viewpoints and attitudes that might be in contradiction with urban (technocratic) culture. In general terms, a dissenting opinion is always at least partly an outsider’s point-of-view: it is articulated by invoking principles radically different from what it criticizes. In other words, a radical critique must appeal to a form of exteriority: it must come from people who enjoy a subject position exterior to the opinions or the society that they wish to oppose. This exterior subject position might be called an anchoring ground of authenticity: it is rooted in a field of experience that supports authentic values (as opposed to artificial, inauthentic ones). The English romantic poet William Blake—one of the most famous rebels of Anglo-Saxons literary history—sums up this issue very aptly when he writes that “the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) This means that someone who wishes to make a stand against society (against the rise of the Industrial Revolution in Blake’s case) must speak in the name of a world or of a being totally unlike society itself—God, in this case.
During the nineteenth and the twentieth-centuries (actually from Romanticism to Modernism), the main target of dissent has been the political wrongs and the spiritual alienation induced by modern industrialism. Attacks against this oppression have been waged in the name of several exterior principles of authenticity. The Romantics (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley) regarded Nature as a quasi- divine source of spiritual regeneration that might counter the oppressive industrial world. This tradition was carried over into the twentieth century by writers and theoreticians who argued that a better comprehension of instinctual life and the unconscious could serve as antidote to the alienation of the modern “waste land.” This belief was articulated, for instance, by theoreticians of psychoanalysis (Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich) or by psychoanalytically-inclined writers (D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller). In nineteenth- and twentieth-century Marxism, the exterior vantage point that makes the denunciation of industrial capitalism possible is that of the proletariate. In Marx’s logic, the most disadvantaged members of capitalist society understand the workings of oppression much better than the middle- and the upper- classes because they are, in some respect, exterior to the system: they do not have a share in the benefits of exploitation (they are the exploited themselves). Both the socialist and the romantic critique of industrialism served as model for the denunciation of (post)colonial oppression. In this view, colonized populations or Third World countries have a clear perception of the power logic of industrial empires because they are both exterior to the industrial world and subjected to it. Likewise, from a (post)romantic standpoint, the culture of Third World countries is still an organic, non-alienated one, and can therefore serve as a source of regeneration—a function it has played from the period of modernism (Pablo Picasso’s interest in “l’art nègre") to the present day (the vogue of world music).
In this light, we may better understand what is politically alarming in Pynchon’s vision of postmodernity. The representation of city space in Crying Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 150
suggests that any appeal to systems of values exterior to urban-industrialism may no longer be possible. Thus, postmodernity—Inverarity’s world—might signify the end of the romantic and modernist tradition of political dissent. This dystopian possibility is a central concern in Jean Baudrillard’s and Fredric Jameson’s reflections on contemporary culture. To them, the most noticeable impact of postmodernist culture has been the closing off or the co-optation of those exterior subject positions that were essential to the oppositional discourses of the Left. Jameson, citing Baudrillard, argues that capitalism, both as a mode of production and as a culture, has progressively colonized the sites that up to now served as exterior fields of authenticity. Today, he argues, neither the unconscious nor Third-World rebellions can serve as credible sites that could support an oppositional political program.
What the burden of our preceding demonstration suggests, however, is that distance in general (including “critical distance” in particular) has very precisely been abolished in the new space of postmodernism. We are submerged in its henceforth filled and suffused volumes to the point where our now postmodern bodies are bereft of spatial coordinates and practically (let alone theoretically) incapable of distantiation; meanwhile it has already been observed how the prodigious new expansion of multinational capital ends up penetrating and colonizing those very precapitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity. (Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism [1991])
Jameson argues in this passage that postmodern culture erases all the sites of authenticity (nature, the unconscious, the Third World, which were previously used by radicals to legitimate their critique of capitalism.). Thus, Baudrillard’s and Jameson’s arguments allow us to identify the link established in Pynchon’s Crying between a certain form of landscape—the closed field of Inverarity’s San Narciso—and the issue of political opposition and subversion. Indeed, Crying is largely devoted to the story of an insurgent movement—the Tristero rebels that inhabit Inverarity’s country. Pynchon’s goal is to examine whether any kind of dissent remains possible in the landscape of Inverarity’s America.
2.3.2.3.3.2.5.5 Hieroglyphic Revelations: Postmodern Romance
P. 15 "a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning ... an intent to communicate ... an odd religious instant"
We have so far reviewed the negative aspects of Oedipa’s discovery of San Narciso— the suspicion that Inverarity’s suburb might remain closed in upon itself. Yet, if closure and repression were the only import of this moment, the heroine’s apprehension of San Narciso would not go any further than Mucho’s nightmarish visions. The very point of Oedipa’s San Narciso epiphany is precisely that it also constitutes a quasi-religious experience: the landscape sends forth a revelation. However, the imagery used by Pynchon in this context underlines the indirectness of the revelation: the city speaks “past the threshold of understanding ... on some other frequency” (15). One of the most revealing terms used by Pynchon here is “hieroglyphic"—an adjective that refers both to the transistor-like pattern of the San Narciso streets and to the unspoken message that emanates from it. Hieroglyphs are indeed signs with an ambiguous value. On first inspection, they are made up of Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 151
recognizable signifiers—animal figures and objects. In this sense, one might spontaneously believe that they could easily be deciphered—in the same way as we intuitively read the pictograms used in many of our traffic signs. Yet hieroglyphs ultimately do not lend themselves to this intuitive form of decoding: they form a language with its own rules, unknown to many contemporary readers.
Though the actual import of the revelation remains unknown, is possible to make a few guesses about what this secret message might signify. We might expect it to have the value of a modernist epiphany of the kind we encounter in James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. In this case, it would offer what might be called a totalizing insight about Inverarity’s world: it would indicate the basic principles of coherence of this world. In other words, it would reveal how this world hangs together, how it achieves a kind of spiritual unity. From another perspective, if we assume that this totalizing view cannot be obtained, we may imagine that the secret revelation might concern all the elements—Nature, origins, dissent—that the San Narciso landscape seems to exclude. In the narrative logic of the novel, the unheard revelation sent forth by the San Narciso landscape is indeed at the origin of Oedipa’s obsession with the Tristero conspiracy. The rebel group seems to be the legitimate keepers of these clandestine revelations. It is therefore characteristic that the rebel constellation should be introduced into the text immediately after Oedipa’s aborted religious moment.
The quasi-religious atmosphere of Oedipa’s San Narciso epiphany is characteristic of a structure of feeling that we might call postmodern romance10 or the postmodern sublime. This term refers to the tendency to endow the landscapes of postmodern societies with connotations of magic and mystery. The postmodern propension for romance is noticeable in several forms of expression—literature (Pynchon himself; cyberpunk science fiction (see 4.4.2), painting (photorealist cityscapes), or theory (Baudrillard’s fascinated depiction of postmodern megalopolises (see 2.3.3.3.3.2.5.2). Fredric Jameson, in a discussion of photorealist cityscapes, argues that this structure of feeling stands in sharp contrast with the modernist denunciation of urban alienation [fig. 184] (Jameson, Postmodernism 32- 46). It is, for instance, antithetical to the pessimism of Fitzgerald’s ‘valley of ashes’ allegory, which discerns only despair in the modern city. Accordingly, Jameson denounces the romance aspect of postmodern art, arguing that it amounts to a celebration of an alienating system.
10 Romance, in Anglo-Saxon genre theory, is a genre that mixes elements of realism and of magic (the supernatural). Medieval epic texts (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) are usually regarded as instances of romance, as well as later texts like Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (early 19th-c.). Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 152
Figure 185: Robert Gniewek: Times Square, New York City, No 2. This photorealist cityscape illustrates the fascination for the urban world typical of the postmodern sublime.
Beyond this harsh judgment, Jameson’s argument is compelling when it points out that the sense of exhilaration that characterizes representations of postmodern landscapes is a contemporary equivalent of the romantic aesthetic of the sublime: it marks the artists’ ambivalent sense of fascination and terror in the face of an environment too complex to be understood or represented. Whereas the unrepresentable object of romantic art was all-powerful Nature, Jameson believes that postmodern culture is haunted by the complexity of its own social structure, particularly by the intricacy of its technostructure, of its networks of communication. This anxiety about the impossibility to represent contemporary society expresses itself, paradoxically, in the form of a sense of wonder. Clearly, this interpretation seems directly applicable to Oedipa’s San Narciso epiphany: in this passage, the magic revelation occurs right after the heroine perceives that postmodern cities are structured as enigmatic information devices. The bafflement experienced by Oedipa is rooted in her apprehension of this new technology.11
2.3.2.3.3.2.6 Semiotic Ecstasy and Paranoid Delirium: Oedipa’s Night-Time Drifting
P. 81 "The city was hers ... she had safe passage ... The repetition of symbols was to be enough."
The subject position constructed here is in some respect antithetical to the San Narciso epiphany. This passage marks indeed a change in the heroine’s attitude—a reversal comparable to that which affected Mucho in the course of the narrative. We might call this scene of night-time drifting the moment of Oedipa’s semiotic ecstasy’ In her wanderings through the city, Oedipa think she discern the secret symbol of the Tristero fraternity—the muted post horn—everywhere. It is as if the landscape were
11 In philosophical terms, the affinity between postmodernism and the sublime is the object of several of Jean-François Lyotard’s essays: Le différend, Leçons sur l’analytique du sublime, Le postmoderne expliqué aux enfants. Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 153
bombarding her with messages. The discreet, unspoken epiphany she experienced in the beginning of the text has now changed into a proliferation of hieroglyphic signs. Instead of her previous stance of cautious expectancy, Oedipa now experiences a strong sense of exhilaration and self-confidence ("the city was hers"). This is the emotion of a character who is about to experience a full-fledged mystical disclosure. Yet, simultaneously, the scene marks her surrender to paranoid delirium—the disorder that affects mental patients who attribute important meanings to all kinds of meaningless phenomena. At this stage, in Oedipa’s perception, the city is all signs: it seems to offer itself entirely for an ecstatic semiotic deciphering. In fact, nothing substantial is really revealed here about Inverarity’s world, except that it has the capacity to fill the protagonist’s mind with and obsession for secret revelations.
2.3.2.3.3.2.7 Apocalypse vs. Internal Exile
P. 124-25 ”... searching ceaseless for that magical Other ... for the unnamable act, the recognition, the Word."
"She remembered drifters ... in exile ... yet congruent with the cheered land she lived in ..."
This passage, located right before the closing of the novel, sums up the options left to Oedipa as she reaches the end of her inconclusive search for the Tristero—for the group of dissenters that might lift the curse that bears on the American landscape. The passage—indeed one of the most difficult in the novel—oscillates between two possibilities: on the one hand, a longing for apocalypse, for the complete annihilation of Inverarity’s domains, and, on the other hand, the resolve to live within this territory like squatters or exiles—geographically sharing the same space but paying no attention to San Narciso’s power structure.
Apocalypse should here be understood in its Biblical meaning, that is, as a final revelation that abolishes the fallen human world and establishes the realm of God. In Pynchon’s novel, this momentous crisis would manifest itself as the sudden appearance of the “magical Other.” This figure is the final interlocutor whom all the people trapped in San Narciso’s information network—Oedipa, particularly—are implicitly trying to reach without success. Reaching this “magical Other” is, paradoxically both an act of communication and the gesture that abolishes all communication: the intent to communicate is fulfilled for good, and therefore forever put to rest. By the same logic, finding the “magical Other” amounts to recognizing “the Word"—presumably the divine language that cancels all imperfect human idioms.
Note that traces of this apocalyptic sensibility were already apparent in Mucho’s and Oedipa’s previous subject positions: Mucho’s ‘car-lot nightmare,’ which expresses an absolute disgust for the capitalist market, seems to call for a radical gesture of escape and annihilation. Likewise, Oedipa’s moments of ‘semiotic ecstasy,’ when the heroine feels that the city dissolves into a web of hieroglyphs, suggest that the actual shape of the urban-industrial complex might end up vanishing into thin air, and might leave room for a completely transparent language—"the Word."
Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 154
By comparison, internal exile is a milder and more practicable way of making peace with Inverarity’s world. Exile, in this case, refers to the situation of people— the “drifters,” the “squatters” and all of those who have no share in America’s inheritance—who therefore manage to live in Inverarity’s country without surrendering to its technostructure. This subject position is beautifully expressed in Oedipa’s reminiscences about the drifters she encountered in the past. She remembers, particularly, people resting at the top of telephone poles, in a linesman’s tent (the temporary shelter used by telephone employees to repair the overhead lines). These squatters live “in the very copper rigging and secular miracle of communication, untroubled by the dumb voltages flickering their miles, the night long, in the thousands of unheard messages” (124). They seem therefore to enjoy a dreamlike, paradoxical form of social insertion: they are at the very heart of the communication network, yet unaffected by it. Particularly, they seem to escape the frustration inherent to San Narciso technology—the fact that the millions of messages are fundamentally “unheard."
2.3.2.3.3.3 Closure and the Promise of Openness and Revelation
The allegorical scenes discussed above seem on first inspection to develop incompatible perspectives about postmodern America (acceptance, rejection, hope, despair). Moreover, it is not clear whether these scenes are organized according to any narrative or logical progression. The only undeniable structural principles of Crying are the fact that the novel develops a quest narrative, similar to a crime investigation, and that it closes with an open ending—the promised revelation is postponed beyond the limits of the novel.
One may, however, point out that the succession of allegorical snapshots—however dissimilar they may seem—obeys a minimal principle of organization: the different scenes are linked to one another by the fact that they carry connotations of closure and openness. Thus, thematically speaking, the novel deploys a sequence of allegorical scenes implying that the postmodern information society is either a closed system or an environment offering a promise of openness, utopia, or emancipation.
In what follows, we will symbolize closure and openness by means of the following symbols (closure: ₪; openness: ?). We will rank the allegorical vignettes discussed above accordingly. (The question mark symbolizing openness implies that the latter possibility is always hypothetical in Crying).
₪ Mucho’s car-lot nightmare (entropic consumerism): this negative vision implies that consumerism is closed in upon itself and metaphorically incestuous:
₪ Mucho’s Muzak revelation (mass-culture ecstasy): though ostensibly pleasurable, this subject position implies surrender to consumerism.
₪ + ? The San Narciso epiphany: San Narciso seems closed in upon itself, walled up in its narcissism. Yet it triggers a promise of revelation.
? → ₪ Nostalgia: nostalgia aspires to values and emotions unavailable in the present situation. It is therefore aimed at openness (the desire for something different). Yet it ends in closure because the lost values are irretrievable.
Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 155
? → ₪ Semiotic ecstasy: semiotic ecstasy seems to promise limitless revelation. Yet the saturation of messages, as well as the paranoia triggered by this profusion of signs makes the experience veer towards closure.
? → ₪ Apocalypse: apocalypse, in spite of its foreboding connotations, carries a promise of revelation. Yet, because the revelation is meant to be final, it leads to closure again.
₪ + ? Internal exile: this subject position offers the possibility of maintaining openness in the middle of closure.
₪ / ? The crying of Lot 49: at the auction scene, Oedipa is still eager to learn more about the Tristero, yet she suspects that the revelation might not be a hopeful one.
The above diagram indicates that the novel constantly shuttles between contrasted evaluations of postmodern America. It never settles on one single possibility: there is no resolution. We will see below that the same logic informs the development of the Tristero narrative. Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 156
2.3.2.4 The Tristero Narrative
2.3.2.4.1 Subcultures, Countercultures, Dissent
The immediate offshoot of Oedipa’s San Narciso epiphany is her discovery of subcultural groups and clandestine networks of communication across the whole of Inverarity’s America. The revelation promised by the novel concerns therefore the possibility of dissent. Pynchon develops the thematics of dissent—a concern that will be at the core of all his subsequent novels—by adroitly mixing fact and fiction. Some of the subcultural groups mentioned in the text are borrowed from real life—stamp collectors, rock fans, the mafia, or political groups such as the anti-communist John Birch society. Others are comically fictional: the Peter Pinguid Society, which is a caricature of the John Birch society, the Inamorati Anonymous, the Conjuracion de los Insurgentes Anarquistas ... In the background of these numerous subcultural groups lurks the disquieting figure of the Tristero, this mysterious fraternity plays the part of the theoretical model—the essence of all subcultures and dissent. Through this narrative configuration, which is developed in more than two thirds of the novel, Pynchon raises the following questions:
— Can subcultures, which are not necessarily political or oppositional, become the backbone of a counterculture—a force of political change?
— Are subcultures or countercultures necessarily vectors of emancipation? Don’t they have a sinister underside?
As we may expect, the novel brings no definitive answers to these important questions
2.3.2.4.2 The Tristero: A Counterforce for the Information Age
P. 124 "Were the squatters there in touch with others, through Tristero: were they helping carry forward that 300 years of the house’s disinheritance?"
The very concept of a fraternity of dissenters—a “counterforce,” as Pynchon puts it in Gravity’s—can be traced back to the inheritance narrative that is central to Crying: the Tristero acts as the hidden network that links together all those who have had no share in Inverarity’s inheritance—all those who, as we just saw, live in internal exile within San Narciso. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon will use the term “Preterites” in order to refer to the members such hidden communities. The Preterites are the perennially excluded—those who have been passed over. They have enjoyed neither power or prosperity and, characteristically, their experience has not been retained in historical records: they are the outcasts of official histories.
In Gravity’s Rainbow, political opposition means seizing rocket technology. In Crying, on the contrary, the ‘preterite’ constellation is primarily concerned with information, with the transmission of messages:
P. 113 "[W]hoever could control the lines of communication, among all these princes, would control them. That network someday could unify the Continent." Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 157
This is indeed the kind of counterculture that fits an information society (see 4.4.2). Subversion, in this context, means controlling information channels or subverting them. Accordingly, The Tristero group sets up competing courier systems—for instance, the W.A.S.T.E network Oedipa discovers in San Narciso. Also, it prints forged stamps, which amounts to feeding parasitical information into the system. Some of the main splinter groups engaged in these activities are the following:
. The Yoyodine dissidents: military engineers with countercultural ambitions (pp. 30-31)
. The anti-communist Peter Pinguid Society, whose members are “so right- wing [they] are almost left-wing” (pp. 32-33).
— The Inamorati Anonymous: a fraternity of disenchanted lovers (pp. 78- 80).
— Western couriers competing with the Poney Express (the private postal system that covered the American West) (p. 63).
— The Tristero couriers themselves, who competed with the Thurn and Taxis system (pp. 108-119).
From the list above, we understand that it is not Pynchon’s intention to offer a sentimental, utopian vision of dissent. Some of these groups are right-wingers, others are pure eccentrics. In this, the novel makes a difficult and rather disenchanted point about the possibilities for subversion. We will indeed see below that subversives have no fixed political function: they do not consistently stand for goodness and virtue; the value of their actions tends to change over time. Characteristically, the Tristero group appears in contrasted manifestations: it is sometimes the “magical Other” that Oedipa seeks in the communication networks of Inverarity’s country (p. 125), but it is also, less promisingly, a “brute Other,” a destructive force (p. 108). The complexity of the Tristero narrative is due precisely to the novel’s effort never to offer a simplistic vision of this unstable group.
There is a direct correspondence between the paradoxical, apparently inconsistent nature of the Tristero and the difficulties experienced by Oedipa to reconstruct its history. Indeed, it is fundamentally impossible to summarize in simple terms what the text has to say about these rebels and outcasts. In what follows, we will see that their group—if it exists at all—can only be represented indirectly, through many fictional or textual screens. We will therefore have to clarify the obstacles that prevent a straightforward representation of the Tristero. Three major obstacles are reviewed in the following sections:
. the elusiveness of diversity and dissent: the novel presents any departure from conformity as inherently fragile
. paranoia: the search for meaning beyond phenomena might be a symptom of paranoia. In this light, the Tristero might only be Oedipa’s Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 158
hallucination—a pseudo-rational pattern that she constructs out of actually meaningless clues.
. the necessity to speak in borrowed voices: there doesn’t seem to be any ‘voice of authenticity’ in the text. Everything has to be conveyed through pastiche or parody.
Accordingly, we will be led to the conclusion that the main theme of the Tristero narrative is less the nature of the movement than the very fact that it cannot be represented adequately. The novel focuses much more on Oedipa’s struggle to interpret the signs pointing to the Tristero’s existence than on the actual group itself. When the history of the conspiracy is presented at the end of the text, we do feel that we have obtained the reward due to any reader (and to the quest heroine herself). Yet there are many indications in the novel that this tale comes short of a substantial, reliable account. More accurately, we feel that the very wish to obtain this full report can never be fulfilled in the postmodern environment of Inverarity’s America.
2.3.2.4.3 The Elusiveness of Diversity
P. 125 “... with the chances once so good for diversity ..."
If the Tristero rebels seem to introduce some measure of diversity into Inverarity’s country, the novel makes abundantly clear that, in the postmodern environment, diversity—genuine otherness—is bound to remain fragile, elusive. The fragility of dissent is manifested—staged, as it were—in many formal and structural aspects of the text. For instance, we have seen above that the fragility of otherness is the structural principle that determines the succession of ‘allegorical snapshots’ of San Narciso (see 2.3.3.3.3.2). The sequence of the latter passages within the novel, suggests indeed that the closed system of San Narciso has an irrepressible tendency to reconstitute itself, to protect its own closure.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in Anti-Oedipus [1972] and Mille Plateaux [1980] have developed reflections on the meaning of minorities that fit the representation of subcultures in Crying. Deleuze and Guattari make a distinction between “minority status” (“être minoritaire”) and being a minority (“minorité”). The distinction implies that persons with “minority status” carry out a genuine subversion of existing norms, yet in many cases, they come to aspire to the more stable status of being a minority. In so doing, they only reconstitute the dominant power logic against which they rebelled in the first place: closure is re-established through cooptation. In Mille Plateaux, the French theorists describe the same phenomenon by mentioning the constant opposition in culture and politics of processes that follow “lines of flight” (“lignes de fuite”), i.e. the desire for total emancipation, and, on the other hand. aspirations toward “reterritorialization”—stability and power. Symptomatically, in Crying, the meaning of the W.A.S.T.E. acronym—the name of the Tristero underground mail system might be “We await Silent Tristero’s Empire,” which implies the creation of a new system, and therefore a process of reterritorialization.
If real otherness is as transient as Pynchon, Deleuze, and Guattari imply, it can only be produced dynamically—by a rupture of order, by a temporary breach of Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 159 symmetry. This is the point that is made in the important, though arguably difficult, passage in which Oedipa sums up her reflections on her quest (pp. 124-26). On the face of it, the scene seems to promise final liberation:
P. 125 "Behind the hieroglyphic streets, there would either be a transcendent meaning or only the earth ... Another mode of being behind the obvious, or none ... Either ... true paranoia ... or a real Tristero.” [emphasis added]
Oedipa now seems about to see the truth beyond the ‘hieroglyphic street,’ to reclaim Nature (‘the earth’) or even to reach the “real Tristero.” Yet, these apparently triumphant statements are undercut by the imagery used in these lines. As Oedipa envisages all of these apparently desirable alternatives, she feels like walking through a huge computer that covers the landscape (in the same way as the printed circuit covered San Narciso). All the possibilities are neatly ordered, as if they were produced by binary logic:
P. 125 "For it was now like walking among the matrixes of a great digital computer ..."
P. 126 "One and zeroes, so did the couples arrange themselves"
“... the zeroes and ones twinned above ... thick, maybe endless ..."
Thus, there is a connotation of entrapment in the way these revelations manifest themselves. Oedipa is caught in an ‘either ...or ...’ logic. There will be no genuine diversity in such epiphanies because, according to the ‘either ... or’ pattern, one aspect of her experience would have to be obliterated, silenced, cut off in the process. The text itself describes this situation as the obligation to choose between “ones and zeroes.” In the system we have adopted above, it corresponds to the fact that the promised revelation (₪ + ?) is replaced by a rigid alternative (₪ or ₪) which corresponds in fact to closure (₪):
PROMISE > EITHER / OR > CLOSURE Hieroglyphs deciphered? Deciphering or Therefore no real Return to Nature (earth)? Nature (earth) diversity Real Tristero? Tristero or paranoid ecstasy
₪ + ? ₪ or ₪ = ₪
In view of this, we understand that genuine diversity could only appear in this context if the well-ordered logic were allowed to misfire, if an element of asymmetry were allowed to appear:
P. 125 "[Oedipa is] ...waiting for a symmetry of choices to break down, to go skew ..."
We will see that the hope that to precipitate such a breach of symmetry— the apparition of genuine otherness—is central to the Tristero story. The conspiracy Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 160
narrative, in its complex development, seems indeed to perform this breach of symmetry, to act it out. Of course, this representation of otherness remains, by definition, unstable.
2.3.2.4.4 The Tristero Narrative: Story Analysis
2.3.2.4.4.1 “Story” vs. “Plot”
In general terms, the discussion of the Tristero narrative developed in the present section aims to show that this story enacts—performs—in its very structure the thematics of otherness. In order to bring this to light, we will approach the Tristero narrative from two angles—its ‘story’ and its ‘plot.’ Here, I use ‘story’ (‘histoire;’ ‘fabula’) and ‘plot’ (‘discours;’ ‘sujet’) in the technical sense these terms have acquired in narratology—the theory of narrative. In this context, ‘Story’ designates the narrative in its ‘ideal,’ abstract form: it is the sequence of events that can be reconstructed from the narrative once its incidents are rearranged according to chronological logic. The ‘plot,’ on the other hand, is the narrative as it is actually presented to the reader, from the first page to the last. In most cases, the ‘plot’ differs from the ‘story’ in many respects because the events that make up the narrative are not reported chronologically: the writer may indeed use flashbacks, flashforwards, frame narratives or embedded anecdotes that depart from a straight chronological sequence. Therefore, one must also distinguish between ‘story time’ [Erzählte Zeit]— the chronological sequence of the narrative’s actions—and ‘narration time’ [Erzählzeit], the temporal logic of the plot, with all its possible meanderings, delaying tactics, chronological inversions, and flashbacks ...
This distinction is particularly important because, in Crying, there is a huge gap between the story and the plot of the Tristero narrative: Pynchon’s novel makes it difficult—if not nearly impossible—for its (first-time) readers to form an accurate concept of the history of the Tristero group. Indeed, the clues and the passages that add up to the Tristero narrative are so widely scattered through the text or presented so indirectly that it seems imperative to deal with story and plot separately. We have already indicated above that this indirect, fuzzy presentation of the Tristero is no arbitrary decision of Pynchon’s part: the main aspect of the Tristero quest is precisely the difficulties experienced by Oedipa (or by the reader) to circumscribe it through language. From a different perspective, we may assume that the writer uses this highly complex story in order to engage in a metafictional game with his readers: he challenges us to reconstruct the narrative’s ‘story’, knowing quite well that the elements that are presented in the novel—the ‘plot’—can barely be reduced to such a coherent story line.
2.3.2.4.4.2 Thurn and Taxis vs. Tristero: A Story of Postal Subversion
A schematic reconstruction of the Tristero ‘story’ would be approximately as indicated below. The column on the left side chronicles the development of the Thurn and Taxis postal system, or that of other established powers. The one on the right side describes the evolution of the Tristero system. I have used the symbols introduced above (₪ and ₪ + ?) in order to show how the story articulates the problematic of closure and otherness. Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 161
Thurn and Taxis Tristero pp. 109-110: LATE-SIXTEENTH CENTURY: the Thurn and Taxis family are granted a postal monopoly for the Holy German Empire (the Habsburg territories). Leonard I, Baron of Taxis is imperial postmaster. Monopoly = closure = ₪
BRUSSELS, 1577. Because of the religious wars, a protestant postmaster (Jan Hinckhart), appointed by Protestant leader William of Orange, replaces the imperial postmaster. The monopoly is broken: promise of openness: ₪ + ?
Hernando Joaquin de Tristero y Calavera wants to appropriate the postal franchise. He claims he is Hinckart’s cousin, from the legitimate branch of the family. He may, however, be a madman. He wages a guerilla war against his (alleged) cousin. One family divided. Conflict between heirs (the disinheritance theme). Hence, promise of openness, since the unity—or closure—of the family is broken: ₪ + ? 1585. The Habsburg armies capture Brussels. Hinckhart is removed from the postmaster’s job. The Thurn and Taxis postmaster is reinstated. The monopoly is reestablished: ₪
However, the Thurn and Taxis monopoly is unstable. The house of Thurn and Taxis is divided: there is a protestant branch. The postal service runs a deficit. The monopoly is weakened: ₪ + ?
Tristero sets up his own postal system, using messengers dressed in black. He claims he has been disinherited and that the monopoly belongs to him by right. A highly ambiguous moment: the monopoly is directly threatened by Tristero; yet, what Tristero wants is to establish a new monopoly, a stable, and therefore potentially oppressive, counterforce: both ₪ + ? and ₪
Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 162
EARLY 17TH C. Dr Diocletian Blobb, riding in a Thurn and Taxis coach, is attacked by a group of Tristero riders. He reports the incident in his memoirs and inquires about the Tristero group.
Richard Wharfinger seems to be using the Blobb anecdote in a play entitled The Courier’s Tragedy.
The Scurvhamites, a radical protestant sect under the reign of Charles I publish a pornographic version of Wharfinger’s play. They seem to believe that the mysterious Tristero system is similar to the ‘brute Other’ that, according to their theology, competes with God for the control of the world. Scurvhamite theology is dualistic (it seems to promise openness): ₪ + ? Yet this dualism is entirely rigid (see above 5.4.3.2): ₪
The direct reference to Tristero—the clue that leads Oedipa to enquire about the group in the first place—only appears in the Scurvhamite version, which can be found in the Vatican library. Thus, the Scurvhamites have used linguistic subversion: changing the language of the original text for oppositional ends. Linguistic subversion: ₪ + ? pp. 112-113: More trouble for the Thurn and Taxis monopoly: It must compete against local private carriers. The Thirty Years’ War leads to the fragmentation of the Habsburg empire, on which the Thurn and Taxis postal licence relies. Thurn and Taxis officials become paranoid about their invisible enemy. The monopoly is at risk: ₪ + ? A leader in the Tristero system (Emory Bortz calls him Konrad, for simplicity’s sake) looks forward to the dissolution of the Habsburg empire. He suggests the Tristero system merge with Thurn and Taxis, thus securing control over the empire. This would lead to a new monopoly: ₪
However, members of the Tristero are divided over this proposal. There are rival factions. Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 163
The new unity of the Tristero brotherhood is broken: ₪ + ?
1795: THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. The Thurn and Taxis license is officially revoked. This could be the result of a Tristero manoeuver. End of the monopoly (at least in its Thurn and Taxis form): ₪ + ?
Pp. 119-120 The French Revolution triggers a schism in the Tristero movement. Some of its members want to help the troubled Thurn and Taxis system by subsidizing it. Again, an ambiguous moment: division within Tristero (₪ + ?), yet ambition to reconstitute the monopoly (₪)
EARLY 19TH-C. The Tristero enters a period of historical eclipse. The counterforce is weakened; this works to the advantage of all established powers: ₪
The Tristero, deprived of its aristocratic patrons, survives among anarchist groups. Subversion: ₪ + ?
These progressive groups are defeated during the failed revolutions of 1848 and the conservative reaction of 1849. Subversion defeated: ₪
The Tristero anarchists emigrate to the U.S. They oppose the American Republic (the Union), presumably because, under its surface of liberalism, it is bound to degenerate into an oppressive regime. Subversion: ₪ + ?
1845: The U.S introduce a postal reform that progressively puts independent postal carriers out of business. Beginning of a new monopoly: ₪
Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 164
The American Tristero carriers attack Pony Express couriers, who act as the postal arm of European colonization in America. The Tristero couriers, on the contrary, mingle with Native Americans, the victims of colonization. Defending the underdog: ₪ + ?
20TH. CENTURY The Tristero is marginalized, reduced to silence or disguise: Apparent powerlessness of the counterforce: ₪ Its activities boil down to linguistic or cultural subversion: its members issue modified stamps—for instance a garbled version of a 1958 Brussels World Fair stamp—and set up the underground W.A.S.T.E. system. Anarchist activists create groups like the CIA, which could be mistaken for the American intelligence service, but is in fact the Conjuracion de los Insurgentes Anarquistas (82). Cultural subversion: ₪ + ?
Pierce Inverarity turns out to be an avid collector of these forgeries. Radical ambiguity: how can the very embodiment of American capitalism be related to the subversive Tristero group: both ₪ and ₪ + ?
Pierce’s collection of Tristero forgeries will be auctioned as ‘Lot 49.’ A mysterious bidder— presumably a member of the Tristero—will show up at the auction. The promise of otherness is offered once again: ₪ + ?
Summarized in this way, it becomes clear that the highly complex Tristero story is made up of an alternation of moments of closure (₪) and of openness (₪+ ?). However, what makes the story both intricate and highly interesting is the fact that none of the opposite camps—the Thurn and Taxis or the US government or, on the other hand, the Tristero—has a monopoly on openness. In other words, there are no stereotypical good guys in this story: the rebels regularly revert to dreams of monopolistic power, which makes them difficult to distinguish from their opponents.
Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 165
2.3.2.4.4.3 The Courier’s Tragedy: Pynchon’s Use of Family Narratives
Pynchon’s emphasis on the fragility of rebellion and the resilience of conformity is expressed in his novel by the use of family narratives. At bottom, the Tristero narrative focuses on divisions and disinheritance within the same family. Such families or political groups are both united and disunited: the established powers are regularly threatened by decay, which takes the form of internal divisions or schisms: Tristero is originally Jan Hinckhart’s cousin; Hinckhart is himself a substitute for Thurn and Taxis; likewise, the Tristero fraternity experiences several schisms. On the other hand, these families tend to regroup: they have a tendency toward closure and conformity and incest (see 2.3.3.3.3.3): at several junctures, the Tristero attempts to reconstitute the monopoly by making deals with Thurn and Taxis; Pierce Inverarity, the arch-capitalist, seems to be related to the Tristero clan after all.
Pynchon’s tendency to represent his thematics of closure and openness through family narratives is further illustrated in his parody of a Jacobean play—The Courier’s Tragedy, attributed to one Richard Wharfinger. From the point-of-view of narrative structure, this pseudo-Jacobean play is highly similar to the Tristero story. On the one hand, Pynchon is here again flaunting his ability to spin a yarn so complex that it challenges his reader’s abilities. This complexity is, or course, playful (it is a metafictional game). On the other hand, the play resembles the Tristero narrative because its characters do not have a fixed, predictable value. The play illustrates this point primarily by developing a thematics of good and evil. Thus, it presents characters that tend to slide from good to evil or vice-versa. Simultaneously, the characters’ roles are defined by their attitude toward the Tristero fraternity—whether they oppose it or support it. Belonging to this group is, of course, no guarantee of virtue.
Pp. 44-50 "Angelo, then, evil Duke of Squamuglia ... murdered the good duke ... evil illegitimate son, Pasquale ... his half-brother Niccolò ... “
On the face of it, the play deals with a conflict between two aristocratic houses, one of which seemingly stands on the side of goodness and virtue (The Faggios), the other on the side of evil (Squamuglia). However, the play soon reveals that the two enemy clans are closely interrelated, and that good and evil are closely intermingled. The embodiments of good and evil in the younger generation—respectively Niccolo, the legitimate heir of Faggio, and Pasquale, the ursurper—are in fact half-brothers. They have the same mother—Francesca, Squamuglia’s sister. Niccolo’s father is the old duke of Faggio, while Pasquale’s is Squamuglia himself, who had an incestuous relationship with his sister. What the play really describes is therefore one single extended family with internal divisions. Likewise, on closer inspection, the Faggios’ claims to absolute goodness do not resist scrutiny. The elder duke of Faggio, before he was murdered, worshipped San Narcissus, and is therefore equivalent to Pierce Inverarity, the advocate of the established order. His son, young Niccolo is not entirely disinterested: he is indeed a representative of the Thurn and Taxis, seeking to extend their postal monopoly into the Squamuglia dukedom. Squamuglia, on the contrary, whose first name is Angelo, might be a complex figure rather than an arch-villain. He seems to be an ally of the Tristero fraternity, and thus potentially an advocate of dissent. Yet his incestuous relationship is metaphorically reminiscent of Inverarity’s America and of its culture of conformity. Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 166
P. 50 "He that we last as Thurn and Taxis knew ... And Tacit lies the gold once-knotted horn"
What the numerous twists of the play reveal is that the significance of each character is always unstable. His or her devotion to good or evil, their allegiance to Thurn and Taxis or to Tristero, are likely to change. This point is underlined symbolically in the most mysterious incident of The Courier’s Tragedy—the postal imbroglio that leads to Niccolo’s death. During this scene, two enigmatic transformations take place. On the one hand, the letter that Niccolo was meant to deliver spontaneously mutates: from a lying, manipulative message written by Squamuglia to confuse his enemies, it turns into Squamuglia’s confession of all his crimes. Interestingly, the ink used in this message was made out of charcoal produced from the charred bones of murdered Faggian couriers—the Lost Guard. It is as if forgotten voices had finally been given an opportunity to speak (see 2.3.3.3.3.2.5.3]. On the other hand, once Niccolo is killed, he seems—unwittingly—to change his allegiances. His Thurn and Taxis horn is now mute—“And Tacit lies the gold once-knotted horn” (50). This means that the former Thurn and Taxis courier has joined the ranks of the Tristero fraternity.
Overall, after analysing the “stories” of these two narratives, we may conclude that dissent and diversity always have to be represented dynamically—in stories whose elements have paradoxical, shifting or elusive values. It is in this sense that we may claim that these two narratives do not ‘describe’ the action of a group of dissenters, but rather ‘perform’ it by ceaselessly reshuffling their components. Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 167
2.3.2.4.5 The Tristero Narrative: “Plot” Analysis
2.3.2.4.5.1 In Borrowed Voices: Authenticity vs. Intertextuality
I have mentioned above that one of the chief characteristics of the Tristero narrative is that it is not conveyed straightforwardly. A discussion of its “plot” must therefore first address the general reasons underlying Pynchon’s predilection for indirectness.
P. 50 “... a new mode of expression takes over. It can only be called ritual reluctance. Certain things, it is made clear, will not be spoken aloud ... “
The first rationale for such an indirect presentation is the impossibility for the writer to use what we might call a “voice of authenticity”—an idiom through which he could directly communicate essential truths to his audience (see 2.3.4.4.4). This pessimistic view of communication, which Pynchon shares with many writers and theoreticians, is due to the general configuration of postmodern culture—particularly to its apparent closure. We have seen above that, in previous historical periods, when a dissenting opinion had to be formulated, it could appeal to a principle exterior to the society it wished to criticize (see 2.3.3.3.3.2.5.4). In this sense, rebellion, William Blake argued, speaks in “the voice of God.” In postmodernity, however, this appeal to an exterior principle is supposedly impossible: unless writers resign themselves to silence, everything they wish to convey has to be worded in the idioms available in the culture itself. In other words, any claim to authenticity or truth has to be worded in “borrowed” voices—that is, by intertextual means. Accordingly, the text’s most crucial issues have to be conveyed through stories like The Courier’s Tragedy, which is aptly described as “a Road Runner cartoon in blank verse” (51). In a more extended discussion, it would be possible to show that this inability to avoid intertextual writing—pastiche or parody—is a key element in the comic dimension of the novel. The text is a hybrid patchwork, made up of many fragments of parody: Pynchon makes fun of pop songs, Jacobean plays, TV shows. Yet, below the writer’s obvious delight in pastiching other styles lies a more pessimistic reflection: many scenes in the novel allegorize the inability to secure a fully authentic, private voice:
P. 6 “... there had come this long-distance call ... by a voice beginning in heavy Slavic tones ... then on into hostile Pachuco dialect ... then a Gestapo officer ... and finally his Lamont Cranston voice ..."
Pierce Inverarity appears only once in the novel, and, even so, his apparition is still thoroughly indirect. It is indeed conveyed through Oedipa’s memories of a strange long-distance phone call she received in the middle of the night. The person at the other end of the line, Oedipa realized, must be her former lover, who only spoke in various accents, like a comedian impersonating persons of different nationalities. This comic scene may serve to bring home the idea that Inverarity is an allegorical figure that transcends one single national origin. From another perspective, however, it signals that Inverarity has no voice of his own.
P. 18 "On to the [television] screen bloomed the image of a child of indeterminate sex ... [whose] shoulder-length curls mingled with the shorter hair of a St Bernard ... ‘That’s me, that’s me,’ cried Metzger ... Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 168
‘Which one?’ asked Oedipa. ‘That movie was called ... ‘Cashiered’’ ‘About you and your mother.’ ‘About this kid and his father ...’
When Oedipa meets Metzger, the lawyer who helps her with the Inverarity succession, she notices that he looks like an actor. Indeed, he turns out to have been a child performer in a TV serial. Ironically, however, this grotesque made-for-TV story (it deals with WWI submarine battles in the Dardanelles Strait) is all we learn about Metzger’s past. In this sense, Metzger is a character who comes straight out of a media scenario. Thus, when he points at the screen and says “that’s me,” we may interpret his remark as meaning that the TV script is literally his own story—his inner life. The fact that the TV series is structured as a Freudian parental melodrama reinforces this idea: some characters in Inverarity’s world borrow their psychological make-up from the media.
P. 63 "’What were you dreaming about [your grandfather]?’ ‘Oh, that,’ perhaps embarrassed. ‘It was all mixed in with a Porky Pig cartoon.’ He waved at the [TV] tube. ‘It comes into your dreams, you know. Filthy machine.’
Mr Toth’s reminiscences of his grandfather—private memories—become entangled with cartoon images—a public form of discourse.
P. 67 "‘A post horn,’ Cohen said; ‘the Thurn and Taxis symbol ... ‘ ‘ ... except for the little doojigger sort of coming out of the bell.’ ‘It sounds ridiculous,’ Cohen said, ‘but my guess is it’s a mute.’ [Oedipa] nodded. The black costumes. The silence. The secrecy.
In the logic of the novel, the only escape from inauthentic voices is silence. Accordingly, the muted post horn of the Tristero fraternity symbolizes both their commitment to silent anonymity and their opposition to the mainstream channels of communication. By adding a mute to the Thurn and Taxis horn, the Tristero metaphorically silence the postal monopoly—they subvert and defeat its main icon. Tristero’s vow of silence should be understood as a gesture of opposition to a cultural sphere in which any voice becomes automatically public, scripted according to media conventions. We may also recognize in this a rationale for Pynchon’s own obsession with anonymity.
2.3.2.4.5.2 Paranoia and Undecidable Narrative Focalization
P. 75 "With coincidences blossoming these days wherever she looked, she had nothing but a sound, as word, Trystero, to hold them together."
P. 75 "Either Trystero did exist in its own right, or it was being presumed, perhaps fantasied by Oedipa ... “
Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 169
P. 118 "Either you have stumbled indeed ... on to a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies ... for the official government delivery system; ... Or you are hallucinating."
P. 56 "Shall I project a world? ... Anything might help."
Throughout Oedipa’s investigation, the suspicion is raised, often by the heroine herself, that her obsession with a secret mail system is only the result of paranoid hallucinations. In this light, the difficulties in representing the underground fraternity—and the resulting twists in the Tristero “plot”—might only reflect the fact that the heroine is losing touch with reality. The novel would then be the record of a descent into mental illness. This interpretation sounds reductive, however. We have the impression that, through a discussion of paranoia, Pynchon reflects on the theory of knowledge—on the epistemology—of postmodernity. Such a broad discussion would have no resonance if the Tristero narrative could be rationalized away as a symptom of madness—as the symptom of a specific individual’s deranged consciousness. Obviously, deciding whether Oedipa’s revelations are just pathological occurrences or whether they have a broader philosophical import requires a detailed analysis of the truth status that the novel lends to Tristero dissidents (are they real or only a fantasy?). The conclusion we will reach is that the existence of this group remains undecidable: the novel’s narration method—its handling of point-of-view or focalization—is such that we cannot solve this enigma for good.
. Paranoia as an epistemological issue Paranoia is a recurrent theme of Pynchon’s novels, and it has been given a lot of attention on the part of critics. We shall first view it as an issue that concerns the epistemology of postmodern culture (its theory of knowledge). The epistemological dimension of paranoia can be explained as follows: paranoid patients live under the delusion that whatever happens to them, including events obviously due to coincidence, is caused by the (generally hostile) actions of well-identified persons. In this sense, they live in a world that is negative in so far as it is “conspiratorial”— animated by the secret machinations of enemies. On the other hand, such a conspiratorial world is paradoxically reassuring in that it is not the prey of uncertainty: in this paranoid logic, all incidents must have a cause; they must be traceable to somebody’s wilful action.
Uncertainty—the inability to achieve verifiable knowledge—is precisely the issue that makes paranoia relevant to the fictional universe described in Crying. Indeed, as far as we can tell, Inverarity’s America (postmodern culture) is an extremely complex domain full of mysterious symptoms and signs whose origin cannot be ascertained. In such a context, any attempt at rational explanation will sound paranoid, because it is immediately suspect of being too schematic, too simple. This is what Oedipa means when she says “[s]hall I project a world?” (56). If she chooses to fish for an explanation to account for the Tristero signs, she may only end up forcing a simplistic—hence, paranoid— thought pattern on a chaotic field of data that will be transformed, disfigured in the process. Her intellectual effort will turn chaos into a (rational) world, but there will be no guarantee as to the truth of her conclusions. Thus, in the vision of postmodernity offered by Pynchon, all organized Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 170
knowledge is potentially equivalent to paranoia.12 More accurately, Pynchon’s characters are doomed to hesitate between a vision of their world as basically uncertain, indeterminate, full of elusive influences and, on the other hand, the persistent belief that conspiracies of capitalists, engineers and spies are constantly setting up mysterious powers schemes behind everybody’s back. This is indeed the import of Oedipa’s reflections on pp. 117-118.
. —Paranoia and narrative point-of-view For this interpretation of Pynchonian paranoia to be compelling, we must, however, verify if Pynchon’s narrative method can give a semblance of objectivity to the phantom-like Tristero—the object of Oedipa’s investigation (or of her delusions). This entails an analysis of the novel’s point-of-view: is there any reliability in the narrative chain of communication? We will in fact discover that Pynchon’s novel is narrated by means of two apparently incompatible methods: on the one hand, it seems to limit itself to a subjective record of Oedipa’s experience—hence, potentially, the experience of a progressively unstable person. Then again, some passages, particularly a few phrases referring to the Tristero, seem to emanate from another voice, another consciousness. This adds an element of undecidability to the Tristero narrative: Oedipa’s is not the only voice that mentions the mysterious group. The group is not merely a figment of her imagination. Yet it still remains hidden.
On first inspection, Crying fits the pattern of the numerous modernist novels (James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist; Henry James’s the Ambassadors) that have a restricted third-person narration. Texts that follow this method—also called ‘internal focalization’ (Gérard Genette’s term)13 or ‘vision avec’—are narrated by an anonymous voice (as opposed to a personalized “I”-figure). Yet this anonymous voice, unlike in most 19th-century fiction, is not omniscient: the narrator’s field of perception corresponds to the limited vision of a character, sometimes called the “reflector” or the “central consciousness” (terms invented by Henry James). In our case, the reflector—the narrator in disguise—would be Oedipa. The novel seems indeed to suggest that all we learn about Inverarity’s world is channeled through the heroine’s mind—that we are not provided any substantial fact of which she would be ignorant. Conversely, we share all her paranoid uncertainties.
There is a very simple procedure, prescribed by Roland Barthes,14 which allows us to verify whether the novel sticks to internal focalization: rewrite the text in
12 The affinity between rational explanation and paranoia is something that historians implicitly acknowledge when they describe certain types of historical narratives as “conspiratorial” In this view, there is always a tendency to reduce a complex historical situation, submitted to heterogeneous causal determinants, to a simple story involving recognizable actors, grouped in evil-minded conspiracies. According to liberal historians in the U.S., certain types of approaches—notably Marxism—are bound to be “conspiratorial,” because they read history as a preordained plot (capitalist exploitation is always the villain). One may object to this that, in some cases, events are indeed brought about by well-identified people acting in the full knowledge of what they do. 13 See Genette’s “Discours du récit” in Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1972) for a full-fledged structuralist discussion of point-of-view. Genette shows that the previous models of narration, elaborated notably by the Anglo-Saxon modernists and New Critics (Henry James, Percy Lubbock, Wayne C. Booth) are a bit reductive: they tend to view the narrative instance (the voice; the focalizing gaze) as a unified consciousness, which, Genette believes, is not the case. In the present reading of Crying, I have basically followed the model of the New Critics. 14 Roland Barthes, “Analyse structurale du récit,” Communication 8 (Paris: Seuil, 1966; 1981), 1-27. Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 171
the first person, and see if still sounds credible.15 Let us apply this formula to the first sentences of the novel:
One summer afternoon I came home form a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that I, Oedipa, had been named executor, or I supposed executrix of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.
This shows that the novel (this section at least) is by and large internally focalized: it is rewritable as a first-person narrative, provided we make a few minor changes (as a first-person narrator, Oedipa would not introduce herself and Inverarity as if they were unknown quantities; she might say “my former lover, Pierce Inverarity ...”).16
If Oedipa is indeed a reflector, in the Jamesian sense of the term, the issue of Tristero’s mode of existence seems rather simple to solve. If all the incidents reported in the novel are channelled through her perceptions, it would be highly compelling to conclude that we are merely witnesses of her paranoid hallucinations, and that the Tristero probably never existed. Indeed, no information about the dissidents is, in this logic, untainted by Oedipa’s subjectivity. Worse still, she herself doubts the existence of the group.
However, against this subjectivist reading of Crying, it is possible to demonstrate that the novel contains references to Tristero —some of them discreet, others rather conspicuous—that cannot possibly have been conveyed by Oedipa’s subjectivity, or by any other personalized narrator. In other words, there are moments of “objective,” “non-focalized” narration that testify to the existence of the Tristero fraternity. In fact, the very term “Tristero” is first introduced into the text in two of these “moments of objectivity”:
P. 29 "Things then did not delay in turning curious. If one object behind her discovery of what she was to label the Tristero System or often only The Tristero ... “
P. 36 "So began, for Oedipa, the languid, sinister blooming of The Tristero."
These lines appear, respectively, before and after Oedipa’s first visit to the techno-bar “The Scope,” where she first witnesses the routine of the W.A.S.T.E. couriers, and where she discovers the first post-horn sign. Yet neither Mike Fallopian, Oedipa’s interlocutor at this point, nor any of the other techno-dissidents at the bar mention the word “Tristero.” As readers, we therefore feel obliged to enquire who is really
15 Roland Barthes, “Analyse,” 26. In Barthes’s own terminology ‘internal focalization’ is called “personal narration,” and is contrasted to ‘impersonal narration,’ which corresponds to the “ominiscient narrator” of the New Critics. 16 This passage verifies the idea of structuralist narratologists (Barthes, Genette) that focalization is not as simple as what the New Critics indicated. Barthes and Genette believe that most texts switch constantly from the “focalized (restricted) to the “non-focalized” (omniscient) narrative method (Barthes, “Analyse,” 26). Likewise, a text using the ‘reflector’ device (restricted third-person narration) is not purely and simply a first-person account rewritten in the third person. Changes have to be made to switch from one pronoun to the latter—changes that may have an effect on the all perception of the fictional world. Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 172
speaking the Tristero lines quoted above. Who, at this point of the plot, would know of this name? If we wish to stick to the subjectivist interpretation of the novel, we could still argue that the lines constitute retrospective comments uttered by the reflector—by Oedipa—as she looks back on her quest (in Barthes’s rewrite: “the discovery of what I was to label the Tristero”; “So began for me the languid, sinister blooming of the Tristero ... “). There is, however, a decisive objection to this: the overall structure of the novel is such that it excludes any retrospective perspective. When the novel closes, Oedipa is still waiting for Lot 49 to be auctioned off and for the Tristero buyer to appear. This open ending makes it impossible for us to envisage Oedipa comfortably looking back on her own quest and summarizing its incidents as if they were completely inscribed in her past. Such a retrospective subject position— which implies a sense of closure, the possibility of carefully making sense of disturbing past events—is simply not available in the novel. We must therefore conclude that another voice—the implied author’s? A mysterious witness?—is speaking here, and that this narrative instance knows more about Tristero than Oedipa ever did.
P. 44 "Angelo, then, evil Duke of Squamuglia, has perhaps ten years before the play’s opening murdered the good Duke of adjoining Faggio ... “
Likewise, the synopsis of Wharfinger’s The Courier’s Tragedy constitutes another—much more extended—passage that is not internally focalized. Characteristically, it is also the occasion when Oedipa herself hears the word “Tristero” for the first time. We might object that Oedipa does witness all of the tragic developments of Wharfinger’s story as they are enacted in front of her on the stage: none of this seems to exceed the perceptions of the characters present in the theater. What leads me to conclude that these pages are reported by an anonymous, omniscient consciousness is, however, the style and structure of the synopsis. It would simply be impossible for a first-time observer to produce such a knowledgeable summary of the tragedy. Such a person would be baffled by the complexities of the play, and her or his report would bear traces of this disorientation. The review of play that we read, on the contrary, seems to proceed from someone who knows all twists of the story by heart, who can underline all the dramatic ironies, quote whole passages of blank verse verbatim, etc. ... It is rather as if, at the point where the synopsis begins, another voice than Oedipa’s were taking over the narration (this shift of the voice is underlined by the phrase, “Angelo, then,” which evokes some other narrator resuming his story-telling).
P. 89 On the swinging part [of the trash can] were hand-painted the initials W.A.S.T.E. She had to look closely to see the periods between the letters.
P. 91 "With her own eyes she had verified a WASTE system; seen two WASTE postmen, a WASTE mailbox; WASTE stamps; WASTE cancellations."
We might conclude at this stage that Pynchon is being playfully, deliberately inconsistent in his narrative method—that he relishes authorial intrusions into the text in order to make the issue of the Tristero more complex and to disorient his readers. Admittedly, Pynchon is fond of such authorial intrusions: a lot of the playfully metafictional and intertextual moments of the novel are generated by the irruption of this different voice (the songs, for instance). Yet, there is a serious, Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 173 philosophical dimension to this technique. Realizing that the novel’s narration is not consistent—that the text is not entirely narrated from a subjective angle—makes things much more interesting: it endows the Tristero with an aura of undecidability. This is particularly noticeable in the scenes that are most explicitly presented as stream-of-consciousness accounts of Oedipa’s paranoid delusions (and that, by definition, should be internally focalized). The long passage of semiotic ecstasy (80- 91), where Oedipa drifts through the city at night, perfectly illustrates this point. Here, we do seem to be dealing with a sequence of non-realistic revelations whose only origin must be the heroine’s mind. Still, because narrative point-of-view is recurrently undecidable in the novel, a nagging uncertainty remains. For instance, absolute confusion surrounds Oedipa’s supposed discovery of a Tristero trash can. The heroine (barely) discerns periods in between the letters of the word WASTE printed on the can. If the dots are indeed present, the can is more than it seems—it is a Tristero sign, an acronym signifying “We Await Silent Tristero’s Empire” (116). However, Pynchon’s astute language makes it absolutely impossible for us to determine objective whether this is an hallucination or not: is the phrase “[s]he had to look closely” ironical, thus indicating delusion, or just a realistic acknowledgment that the dots are small that that the scene takes place in the dark? Is the formula “[w]ith her own eyes” any guarantee of reliability? Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 174
2.3.2.4.5.3 Paper Trails and Borgesian Labyrinths
2.3.2.4.5.3.1 The Legacy of Crime Fiction
The “plot” of the Tristero narrative is, we have indicated above, the principle of construction according to which the “story” of the dissident group is presented through the novel. By its very complexity, the “plot” of the Tristero narrative evokes other text, other genres in which narrative presentation is equally baffling. In other words, there are identifiable intertextual sources for Pynchon’s “plot.” The sources we will take into account are detective fiction (the “paper trail” device), Jorge Luis Borges’s fictional ‘labyrinths, and the frame narratives that appear in story-telling cycles like the Arabian Nights or Boccaccio’s Decameron.
Detective fiction—notably the “hard-boiled” novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler are based on the “paper-trail” device: their protagonists have to reconstruct a ‘story’ (the interpretation of the murder), and, for that purpose, they have to collect evidence that they often discover in books, archives, population registers, statistics, scraps of papers (checks, messages) left behind by suspects. The “plot” of the detective story looks therefore like a pilgrimage from book to text and to other texts again. Note that, in hard-boiled fiction itself, the complexity of this narrative presentation is deliberate, and can become the object of metafictional games: the writers may produce plots so complex that they lead even their expert readers astray. An ironical, metafictional instance of the ‘paper-trail’ device appears in Roman Polanski’s and Christopher Towne’s Chinatown [1973]. In this screenplay, private investigator Jack Gittes (Jack Nicholson) has to reconstruct an intricate real estate and speculation conspiracy, by, for instance, locating names in the population register of a small town. Since Gittes needs a specific page and the confidential records cannot be Xeroxed (the story is set in the 1930s), he fakes a loud sneeze and tears off the (very large) page behind the clerk’s back. p. 6 "The letter was from the law firm ..."
P. 69 "Though her next move should have been to contact Randolph Driblette again, she decided instead to drive up to Berkeley. She wanted to find out where Richard Wharfinger had got his information about Tristero."
P. 58 "Somehow Oedipa got lost."
Oedipa’s itinerary follows the complex exploration path of a crime-fiction paper trail: the whole novel begins when she receives a letter asking her to take care of Inverarity’s inheritance—a legal task involving the handling of many documents, which in turn yield evidence for her investigation. Later, the heroine tracks the Tristero signs in a long series of obscure texts (the Jacobean play; Wharfinger’s sources; philatelic journals...). The influence of detective novels is noticeable particularly in the spatial dimension of Oedipa’s “exploration path:” the heroine is constantly on the move, from one city to the next, from one witness to the other, thus mimicking the activity of a mobile, peripatetic crime-fiction investigator. Note that even at this level, the complexity of the exploration path is impressive. On the one hand, these complex peregrinations, according to the verisimilitude of detective fiction, are always superficially realistic—they are consistent in terms of time and Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 175
space (they can be followed on a map and on a timetable). However, this realism is mostly a façade: the effect of the exploration path is to baffle the readers—to get them lost. Even after repeated readings of Crying, it is difficult to spontaneously remember the sequence of Oedipa’s movements through California.
P. 104 "‘And how,’ [Bortz] said, ‘did you get into the Vatican Library?’
P. 119 "Genghis Cohen ... seemed to come up with new goodies everyday—a listing in an outdated Zumstein catalogue, a friend in the Royal Philatelic Society’s dim memory of some muted post horn spied in the catalogue of an auction held at Dresden in 1923; ... a typescript, sent him by another friend in New York. It was supposed to be a translation of an article from the 1865 issue of the famous Bibliothèque des Timbrephiles of Jean Baptiste Moens,"
2.3.2.4.5.3.2 Borgesian Metafiction
The detective plot of Crying is given a metafictional twist by the fact that Pynchon, in addition to emulating mystery-novels writers, also takes inspiration from Jorge Luis Borges. The Argentinean writer’s highly influential collection of stories Fictions [Ficciones], published in the 1940s, revealed that it was possible to write philosophical thrillers that do not narrate quasi-factual criminal investigations but that focus instead on the world of books, libraries, and language. In Borges’s stories, mysterious worlds and secret societies are discovered in found manuscripts or alternative versions of encyclopedias (see 2.2.1.3.1.2). The enigma pursued by Borgesian investigators is less an actual crime than the working of language itself, its relation to the real (see Borges’s “Tlön. Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” 2.2.1.3.1.2.2). Borges’s own sources for such metafictional stories are not only detective fiction but also the gothic novel. The “found manuscript” device is indeed a familiar trick of gothic novels where awful secrets are revealed in old texts (see Jean Potocki’s Le manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse).
Borges’s influence in Crying is detectable in the fact that Oedipa’s ‘exploration path’—the ‘paper trail’ she follows—quickly becomes a Borgesian labyrinth: it acquires an intertextual, metafictional dimension (see 2.2.1.3.1.2.2). Oedipa’s investigation leads her to reconstruct a whole constellation of book sources, which form a world of their own. At times, we may feel that the Tristero exists exclusively within this textual constellation, or, more accurately, in between this book world and reality. The core of the Borgesian labyrinth is The Courier’s Tragedy, its sources and its variants, which branch off into many directions and render Oedipa’s quest complex and uncertain.
In Borges as in Pynchon, there is a close connection between the creation of labyrinth-like metafictional investigations and the writers’ fascination for secret societies. The alternative reality disclosed by found manuscripts is of necessity shrouded in mystery. The characters whose existence is revealed by means of these confidential documents are bound to remain enigmatic. This implies, from another perspective that Pynchon’s use of metafictional labyrinths is linked to his belief that the subcultures of Inverarity’s America cannot manifest themselves openly.
Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 176
2.3.2.4.5.4 Embedded Stories and “Narrative Donors”
So far, all the aspects of the Tristero “plot” we have discussed—the recourse to borrowed, intertextual voices; the atmosphere of paranoia and undecidability; the paper trail and the Borgesian labyrinth—contributed to making the presentation of the Tristero ‘story’ more complex, more distanced, more fragmented. Yet, despite this apparent complexity, there are some structural elements in the ‘plot’ of the Tristero narrative that are extremely regular and predictable. Though we may very easily get lost if we follow Oedipa’s paper trail, we can rest assured that this tortuous exploration path will lead the heroine to people who will tell her stories about Tristero. Her itinerary is indeed shaped as a series of encounters with a certain number of story-tellers, who in turn refer her to other story-tellers:
P. 31 — The bartender at the Scope tells her stories about the electronic music subculture. P. 32 — Mike Fallopian tells her a story about the Peter Pinguid Society. P. 41 — Manny Di Presso tells her stories about a Mafia conspiracy and the Lago di Pieta incident. P. 42 — One of the Paranoid groupies tells her of the existence of the Courier’s Tragedy performance. P. 44 — Oedipa sees the The Tank Players perform The Courier’s Tragedy P. 53 — Dribblette gives her information about Wharfinger and leads her to bookshops and stamp collectors. P. 58 — Yoyodine engineer Stanley Koteks tells her things about WASTE and sends her to John Nefastis. P. 63 — Mr Thoth at the Vesperhaven home tells tales about the Poney Express. P. 65 — Genghis Cohen, the stamp collector, reveals the existence of Tristero forgeries. P. 72 — John Nefastis shows her a machine supposedly able to reverse entropy— the evolution of the universe toward disorder. P. 76 — A man at the gay bar the Greek Way tells her of the existence of the Inamorati Anonymous. P. 86 — The Sailor, an old drifter, owns a matrass that can act as a sort of material memory banks—it is full of traces of the past. P. 95 — Dr Hilarius, Oedipa’s psychiatrist, tells her of his past at Auschwitz. P. 104 — Emory Bortz, the literature scholar, gives her access to Wharfinger’s source material. P. 107 — Bortz tells her the story of the Scurvhamites. P. 109 — Bortz mentions Diocletian Blobb’s memoirs and starts reconstructing the Tristero story. P. 113 — New encounter with Bortz. He gives her the sequel of the Tristero story. P. 114 — New encounter with Fallopian. He denies any link with the Tristero. P. 115 — New encounter with Cohen. He gives her clues that link Tristero to Inverarity. P. 117 — Cohen mentions an essay by Jean-Baptiste Moens, which discusses the memoirs of Comte de Vouziers, Marquis de Tours et Taxis, who describes the evolution of Tristero in the 19th c. P. 121 — Cohen sends Oedipa to the auction of Lot 49. P. 126 — The anonymous Tristero buyer at the auction might become the next “narrative donor.” Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 177
In technical terms, this means that the main story line of Crying (the account of Oedipa’s quest) serves as a “frame narrative” [récit cadre] for the whole series of “embedded stories” mentioned in the list above, each of which is narrated by a specific story-teller. Gérard Genette calls these figures “intradiegetic narrators”—a narrator we see at work within the narrative. Tzvetan Todorov, in a discussion of The Arabian Nights [Les mille et une nuits] calls them “hommes-récits,” a term we will translate as ‘narrative donors,’ which is interestingly reminiscent of “organ donors.”17
Embedded narratives and “narrative donor” are central formal features in collections of tales like The Arabian Nights, Boccaccio’s Decameron or Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. These works contain a frame narrative that introduces us to the main narrative donors (intradiegetic narrators)—Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights, the Canterbury pilgrims in Chaucer. These figures then proceed to narrate their tales (“Ali Baba,” “Aladdin,” “The Miller’s Tale” “The First Knight’s Tale”), which, compared to the frame narrative, have the status of embedded stories [récits incrustés]. Moreover, Todorov shows that the embedded tales of The Arabian knights may contain still other embedded stories, thus creating a complex narrative chain stretching over several levels of fictionality. Todorov draws from this a conclusion that we may apply to Pynchon’s Crying as well. In the story-telling tradition, he argues, we have the feeling that what is really at stake is less to describe fictional worlds than to spin tales, whose function is to accumulate other tales: the reward of story-telling is to obtain more stories, to meet more “narrative donors,” and to receive from them the sequel of a narrative chain that never ends. This obsession with the perpetuation of narrative is allegorized in the plight of Scheherazade herself, who must keep telling stories in order to stay alive (she entertains a king who sleeps with his wives only one night, then has them executed). Conversely, the system of frame narratives and embedded stories implies that the origin of narratives is not the world but the world of tales themselves: a given story is always born out of another story, in the sense that a tale always originates in a frame narrative and its narrative donor. More generally, the origin of the tale is not the imitation of the outside world, but other stories (be they actual frame narratives or a narrative tradition handed down over time).
Transposed to Oedipa’s world, the notion of narrative donors constructing an endless narrative chain may be read positively or pessimistically. It suggests indeed that any actual contact with—or final representation of—the Tristero is endlessly postponed: the narrative never comes to a final crisis that allows the dissenters to appear as such, to shed their masks or their borrowed voices. All the heroine can hope for is a multiplication of tales that will present the group from different perspectives. The positive dimension of this resides in the fact that the activity of story-telling, the act of handling language may become the main object of Oedipa’s quest and may ultimately serve to articulate strategies of dissent. In this view, dissent is not something that can be acted out with a full sense of reality (in the form of a final revolution, for instance), but that can still be simulated through language:
17 See Genette’s Figures III, 256; Tzvetan Todorov, “Les hommes-récits: Les mille et une nuits, ” Poétique de la prose, choix (Paris: Seuil, 1971, 1978), 33-46. Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 178
subversion, for the Tristero group, takes place with discourse or culture itself, and, for this purpose, linguistic or cultural activity has to perpetuate itself.
John Johnston, in an analysis of Crying, has shown how narrative donors contribute to this activity of discursive subversion. He argues that the function of each intradiegetic narrator with regard to Oedipa is to illustrate a certain way of using language, of handling signs.18 In other words, each of them illustrates a specific semiotic behavior:
. Mike Fallopian is the typical conspiracy theorist: he reads his own obsession (the conflict against the Soviet Union) into all sorts of historical incidents. To him, a naval confrontation of the American Civil War represents the first incident of the Cold War.
. Dribblette is an actor: he does not “describe” what he knows about the Tristero, he rather “performs” it and leaves others to interpret the message. He likes improvisation: his decision to insert the Tristero line into The Courier’s Tragedy was such an improvised decision.
. John Nefastis looks like a crazy scientist out of a comic strip. On the face of it, his material is scientific theories. Yet his language use is rather similar to magic: in his Nefastis machine, he tries to use mental energy in order to reverse the course of physical laws. In this logic, mind should exert a direct influence on matter, which is indeed what magicians attempt to do.
. Emory Bortz and Genghis Cohen are scholars. Their language use is based on research, the collection of texts and sources and their careful interpretation.
. The Tristero itself plays the part of narrative donor, since it demonstrates for the heroine’s benefit how strategies of subversion can be enacted through language.
Thus, by encountering all these figures, Oedipa discovers different ways how to represent, to frame the Tristero—though none of these techniques is ever final. This is the gift that is bestowed on her by the narrative donors. In this sense, her exploration path is an itinerary of apprenticeship.
2.3.2.3.5 The Crying of Lot 49: Conclusion
Though I have initially presented Crying as a novel about technology, it is important to underline that its description of the technostructure is rather sketchy. Pynchon will deal more directly with this topic in Gravity’s Rainbow and will indeed exert thereby a significant influence on postmodern science fiction (see 4.4). Instead, we have seen that Pynchon’s main preoccupation in Crying is imagining subject positions— attitudes that characters or people may adopt with regard to postmodern society. This issue of subject positions concerns not only the main characters—Oedipa and Mucho (see 2.3.3.3.3.2.1) but also the “narrative donors” that shape the “plot” of the
18 John Johnston, “Toward the Schizo-Text: Paranoia as Semiotic Regime in The Crying of Lot 49,” in New Essays on The Crying on Lot 49, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 47-78. Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 179
Tristero narrative: each of them illustrates a way of inhabiting the postmodern world by adopting a proper use of language. Another aspect of the novel we have had no space to discuss is Pynchon’s impressive use of language. The fact that the novel contains a lot of intertextual material—the writers imitates other genres—allows him, for instance, to give free rein to his abilities as a story-teller (cf. Pynchon’s obvious pleasure in narrating The Courier’s Tragedy). Likewise, it would be possible to focus in much more detail on the poetic texture of the many descriptions—the landscapes, particularly—that appear in the text.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 180
2.3.3 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. [1922-2007]
2.3.3.1 Biography
Figure 186: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born in 1922 in a German American family of Indianapolis, Indiana. He attended Cornell University, where he studied chemistry. After college, he enlisted in the army, which gave him the opportunity to study mechanical engineering. Transferred to the European front, he was taken prisoner by the Germans in late 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge (“la Bataille des Ardenness”) and was sent to a prison camp in Dresden. There, he witnessed the fire- bombing of Dresden [1945], an event mentioned in several of his novels. The Dresden bombing is the central event of Slaughterhouse-Five.
After the war, Vonnegut studied anthropology at the University of Chicago, yet he did not graduate: his thesis was refused. In 1971, however, the University accepted his novel Cat’s Cradle as a substitute for his thesis and awarded him the degree. Vonnegut held several jobs after the war and moved several times: he worked in public relations for General Electric, as a journalist for Sports Illustrated, as the manager of the first Saab dealership in the US. After moving several times, he eventually settled in Cape Cod, MA. Vonnegut married twice. His first wife, Jane Marie Cox, was his teenage sweetheart. Three children were born of this first marriage. His second wife was photographer Jill Krementz, with whom he adopted a child. After the death of his sister, Vonnegut adopted her three children.
Vonnegut started writing in the early 1950s. His first novel, Player Piano [1952], is a dystopian science-fiction novel. Vonnegut’s later novels—Mother Night [1961], Cat’s Cradle [1963], Slaughterhouse-Five [1969], Breakfast of Champions [1973]—were sometimes pigeonholed as SF works even though they were mostly experimental texts drawing only partly on SF elements. This genre confusion is typical of the postmodern status of Vonnegut’s writing, half-way between popular and experimental fiction. Vonnegut’s novels rely indeed on metafiction, time shifts, digressions, the mixture of fact and fiction, and absurd humor (“black humor”)—features he shares with other first- generation postmodern novelists (Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller). One of Vonnegut’s favorite techniques is the use of recurring characters—figures appearing in several of his novels: SF writer Kilgore Trout, American Nazi Howard W. Campbell, Jr. … His fictional corpus therefore reads as a literary cycle.
Figure 187: American socialist Eugene Debs
Vonnegut’s novels are the vehicle of his anti-authoritarian politics. Vonnegut asserted himself as a pacifist, a left-wing socialist, and as a humanist (i.e. an agnostic). These left-wing views were influenced by his WWII experience. They also matched the pacifism of the 1960s counterculture—the Vietnam War generation—, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 181
were are also in line with the radicalism of the Beat generation. As an American left-winger of the 1960s, Vonnegut has expressed his admiration for previous figures of the American left: early- twentieth-century socialist activist Eugene Debs [fig 187] or progressive humanist writers such as Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens), author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn [fig 188].
Figure 188: Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain
2.3.3.2 Slaughterhouse-Five
2.3.3.2.1 A Novel that Defies Genre Categories
Slaughterhouse-Five is representative of first-generation postmodernist fiction not only because of its widespread use of metafictional techniques (see 2.3.3.2.2) but also because it straddles the line between canonical and popular fiction (see 1.2.3.3.2.4). Vonnegut began his career as a science-fiction author (see his first novel Player Piano). Symptomatically, even though the tenor of his writing rapidly veered away from the standards of classical sf, his novel were still marketed under the sf label. It is therefore useful to point out that his best- known novels such as Cat’s Cradle and Breakfast of Champions contain few, if any genuine sf elements. Instead, they resemble political or philosophical fables with a satirical dimension. The same remark applies to Slaughterhouse-Five, where the sf plot occupies a significant yet altogether secondary function. Unlike straightforward sf, the novel does not consistently attempt to recreate an alternative or future universe. The sf elements are only subservient to the novel’s more central psychological and political themes.
Overall, the very ambiguity surrounding SH-5’s genre affiliation is illustrative of the evolution of American fiction in the 1960s. By that time, it was possible to publish novels with an apparent sf format yet also resorting to literary experimentation and developing a serious social and moral thematics. The resulting genre confusion is compounded by the fact that many passages of SH-5 are written in a seemingly childlike style, which seems to connect the novel with children’s literature, thereby concealing the seriousness of Vonnegut’s text. This blurring of genre boundaries is the hallmark of postmodernist literature.
2.3.3.2.2 Metafiction in Slaughterhouse-Five
2.3.3.2.2.1 The Gamut of Vonnegut’s Metafictional Techniques.
Slaughterhouse-Five is more explicit in its use of metafiction than Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Pynchon’s text qualifies as metafiction mostly because of the numerous intertextual connections it relies on. Vonnegut’s novel, by comparison, mobilizes all the gamut of metafictional techniques listed by critics such as Patricia Waugh:
• The use of narrative frames and frame breaking: the first chapter of SH5 is a narrative frame in which the author depicts the incidents that led him to write the novel. The main story of SH5—the narrative of Billy Pilgrim’s adventures—is therefore an embedded narrative.
• Intertextuality: the novel not only alludes to, but even quotes or summarizes other texts—history textbooks about WWII and Dresden, other essays, etc.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 182
Figure 189: heraldic mise en abyme: the larger design is (approximately) embedded in the middle of the shield.
• Mise en abyme (self-embedment; the novel within the novel): Mise en abyme is a term borrowed from heraldry [fig. 189]. It designates the device by which a text mirrors itself (see 2.1.3): the text includes an abridged version of itself or describes a work of art to which it displays strong resemblances. (In heraldry, the design of a coat of arms sometimes included a reduced version of itself embedded in the center of the shield) Vonnegut frequently uses the novel-within-the-novel device. Several characters are authors themselves (Air force historian Bertram Copeland Rumfoord, American fascist Howard W. Campbell, Jr., and, above all SF author Kilgore Trout). The presence of Kilgore Trout, a fictional SF writer, allows Vonnegut to fill his narrative with summaries of hypothetical SF novels. We are therefore led to wonder to what extent Trout’s works resemble (or are different from) Vonnegut’s own works. The summaries of Tralfamadorian novels play a similar function.
• Cross-references to Vonnegut’s own works: Vonnegut likes to pepper his texts with references to his other works: he uses recurrent characters and locales. Kilgore Trout and Howard W. Campbell are major characters in other novels (Breakfast of Champions and Mother Night, respectively). The city of Ilium, where Billy Pilgrim resides, appears in Cat’s Cradle and in Breakfast of Champions. This cross-referencing technique is a frame-breaking device: it suggests that Vonnegut’s fictional figures or locales have an objective existence. The line between fact and fiction thereby becomes blurred.
• Narrative fragmentation: SH5 is a spectacularly fragmented text: it contains a huge number of flashbacks and flashforwards. Its narrative constantly shuttles between the author’s present, Billy Pilgrim in the 1950s and ‘60s, Billy’s wartime experiences and his abduction to Tralfamadore. These time shifts are, of course, motivated by Billy’s mental condition: he is “unstuck in time.” The intertextual dimension of the text also contributes to narrative fragmentation since intertextual inserts have the value of digressions. Such a high level of narrative fragmentation may be regarded as an instance of performative metafiction (see 2.13): fragmentation impedes the reading process and leads readers to reflect about their own role in (re)structuring the text.
• Self-conscious narration: Vonnegut intrudes into his own narrative and comments on his own writing process. Predictably, his presence is most visible in the narrative frame (Chapter 1), but there are also several authorial intrusions within Billy’s narrative (Gérard Genette’s calls such authorial intrusions metalepses [sg. “metalepsis”].) Vonnegut’s authorial intrusions are a frame-breaking device: they cross the line separating fiction and fact. In one Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 183
of the most obvious instances of such metalepses, Vonnegut mentions that he is one of the American soldiers depicted in the novel: “This was me” (108)19.
2.3.3.2.2.2 The Psychological Motivation of Metafiction
Metafiction is no mere formal game in SH5. The author makes clear that the structure of his text is justified by the difficulties he experienced in reworking his own traumatic war recollections into a novel. In Chapter 1, Vonnegut indicates that his initial outline for the novel had to be discarded. This change of plan occurred after an argument with Mary O’Hare, the wife of one of his fellow soldiers. Mary warns him against the temptation to write a heroic war narrative, totally blind to the actual sufferings of war. The author accordingly realizes that a war book about extreme suffering cannot be written according to traditional recipes. The novelist must accept that an authentic book about warfare can only be “a failure” (16): it cannot be well-planned, nor can it have rational, consistent characters. The defamiliarizing structure of SH5 is therefore a direct consequence of its subject matter. The novel’s disruptive experimental devices are therefore “motivated” by (i.e. justified by) the author’s and his characters’ sense of psychological disruption. Likewise, because the novel deals with an unwieldy, impossible subject matter, it must comment on its own writing strategies.
2.3.3.2.3 Affluence, Anxiety, Trauma, and Healing.
SH5 may be approached as a novel whose protagonists look back at their WWII experience from the vantage point of the affluent 1950s and ‘60s. Vonnegut’s and Billy Pilgrim’s situations are comparable in this respect: both the real Vonnegut and the fictional Pilgrim were taken prisoners by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge [la bataille des Ardennes]; they were taken to Dresden, endured considerable hardships, survived the allied firestorm bombing of the city, returned to the US, and became members of the affluent postwar (upper)-middle class. In the postwar context, however, they have no opportunity to work out the trauma they experienced during the war. In the first place, their life of affluence does not encourage self-scrutiny. Secondly, from the point of view of Americans and British, WWII was a major victory. The war is therefore perceived through narratives that are all epic in tone. Its representation is constructed on the basis of war films—quite a popular genre in the 1950s and ’60s—e.g. The Longest Day, Operation Crossbow, The Battle of England—or through the heroic accounts of military historians. Such texts devote little attention to the sufferings endured by soldiers—particularly not by soldiers of the victorious camp (cf. Mary O’Hare’s distaste for heroic narrative, p. 11).
In such a situation, trauma can only be repressed: when witnessing an awful elevator incident in the postwar years, Vonnegut responds with indifference, saying he has “seen worse in the war” (7). Still, psychological repression can never be complete: war veterans, however comfortable their social and financial situation, are plagued by anxiety. For instance, the novel implies that Vonnegut has a drinking problem. Similarly, Billy is affected by irrepressible fits of crying “for no apparent reason” (44). The repression of trauma is also hinted at in a mise-en-abyme passage—the synopsis of Kilgore Trout’s Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension: Trout’s book depicts characters suffering from mental diseases whose
19 Page references are to the following edition: Kurt Vonneguts, Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969, London: Vintage, 2000. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 184 causes are located in the fourth dimension, hence completely out of reach—completely repressed (75).
The thematics of trauma and anxiety confer to the novel a very specific function. Vonnegut makes clear that the purpose of the novel is healing: the psychological work that could not be accomplished in the normal run of postwar life will have to be carried out by the literary work itself. The theme of healing is touchingly evoked in a metafictional passage where Billy watches television and, by his ability to become “unstuck in time,” sees a war film about a bombing raid screened in reverse. As the film runs backwards, all the destruction on the ground and in the air is magically healed. The materials used to produce the weapons are even returned to the earth (53-54). From a metafictional perspective, the passage is a mise-en-abyme of SH5, since it depicts in a nutshell the goal the broader narrative is expected to fulfill. We will see below, however, that healing remains problematic (the novel is a “failure": see 2.3.3.2.2.2). Characters are often seduced by inauthentic modes of healing, incompletely acknowledging the horrors of war (see 2.3.3.2.4.2.2)
2.3.3.2.4 Existentialism in SH5
2.3.3.2.4.1 The Existentialist Legacy.
SH5, like other novels of the 1960s, still registers the influence of existentialism, a highly influential philosophical and cultural movement of the mid-twentieth century. Existentialism depicts the plight of human beings—isolated individuals, in most cases—facing an absurd universe and an alienating social context. This structure of feeling emerged in the mid- nineteenth century with philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Sören Kierkegaard. It became an influential cultural movement through the early works of Georg Lukács (Soul and Form [1910], The Theory of the Novel [1916]) and the philosophical treatises and moral essays of Martin Heidegger, Jean Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus (see 2.3.1). The impact of (pre)-existentialism can already be felt in European and Anglo-American literature in the beginning of the twentieth century, in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness [1902], for instance. In 1920s and ‘30s, it was apparent in the works of such writers as Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises [1926], For Whom the Bell Tolls [1940]), Richard Wright (Native Son [1940]), or Graham Greene (Brighton Rock [1938], The Third Man [1949]). Existentialism became a dominant cultural movement in the late 1940s, particularly in France, where the influence of philosopher/novelist/dramatist Jean Paul Sartre was supreme. The impact of French existentialism on English and American literature in the 1950s was considerable: it is noticeable in Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, the Beat writers…
The loss of hegemony of existentialism began in the late 1960s and ’70s, when the focus of intellectual and cultural life veered away from existentialism’s central themes (the absurd, existential and ethical authenticity, freedom) towards the issues favored by (post)structuralism (the structure of sign systems, the politics of discourse, multiculturalism). Symptomatically, the periodization of twentieth-century culture that came in use by the late twentieth century bypasses existentialism altogether (it favors terms such as realism, modernism, postmodernism). Existentialism’s loss of visibility is arguably due to the fact that existentialist philosophy and literature are not vitally interested in issues of literary discourse. Existentialism produced mostly a literature of ideas. In the field of fiction, particularly, literary form was no central concern for existentialist writers: many existentialist novelists stuck to the medium of the realist novel. Turn-of-the-twenty-first-century literary Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 185 scholars, on the contrary, make the structure of literary discourse one of their central criteria for text analysis and literary history.
2.3.3.2.4.2 Existentialism and the War Experience
2.3.3.2.4.2.1 War as Embodiment of the Absurd
Existentialism developed initially as a pessimistic response to modernity: it was triggered by the loss of religious certainties, coupled with the rejection of the alienating life-world of twentieth-century society. As the twentieth century unfolded it became obvious that the experience of war violence—the two world conflicts—massively corroborated the pessimism of existentialist philosophers. War stands as a visible embodiment of the absurdity of the universe. It is therefore logical that many literary works or films dealing with the war experience and its aftermath should be existentialistic in tenor—Hemingways’ For Whom the Bell Tolls, Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead [1948], James Jones’s The Thin Red Line [1962], Robert Altman’s film M.A.S.H. [1970], or Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now [1979], the latter based on the equally existentialistic Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.
It is therefore not surprising that postmodernist war novels of the 1960s—Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-5—should depict war as an existential nightmare. Yossarian, the protagonist of Heller’s Catch 22 realizes that war is sheer madness, masterminded by ruthless bureaucrats. Any strategy, however radical or insane, that may help Yossarian escape military death is therefore worth a try. Similarly, Vonnegut depicts Billy Pilgrim as a character entirely overwhelmed by war. The conflict is for him an experience that defies understanding, that crushes him physically and mentally, and to which he is utterly unable to respond in human terms.
2.3.3.2.4.2.2 Inadequate Responses to the Absurdity of War
In existentialism, the human response to the absurd matters even more than the nature of the absurd itself. People and characters are evaluated by their ability first to acknowledge, then to face up to an absurd universe. In this logic, failing to perceive or refusing to acknowledge the absurd constitutes a major human failing—a destructive form of existential hypocrisy. Jean-Paul Sartre famously calls existentialist hypocrites “bastards” (“les salauds”). He believes indeed that existential blindness lies at the root not only of human stupidity but also of authoritarian behavior: “bastards” impose power structures without any regard to their meaninglessness with regard to the absurd.
Vonnegut’s SH5 endorses Sartre’s judgment: most characters in the novel protect themselves against the absurdity of war by ignoring it or escaping from it—a flaw for which they incur the writer’s disapproval:
Roland Weary: Billy Pilgrim’s fellow-prisoner, is entirely mistaken about the nature of the conflict he is caught up in and about the attitude he should adopt towards it. On the one hand, he puts on hypermasculine posturing by flaunting his fascination with torture and pornography. On the other, he is an unpopular boy in need of protection— a psychological feature made evident by the fact that he is bundled up in as may army-issue clothes as possible (30). His need to join a fantasy fellowship—the Three Musketeers—is emblematic of his existential inability to face up to the war: by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 186
conjuring up Alexandre Dumas’s world of heroic romance, he entirely screens out the horrors of WWII.
The British officers in the Dresden prisoner camp: Like Weary, they hang on to a romantic notion of warfare according to which soldiers are bound by rules of fair play: war prisoners should take care of their bodies and should keep up their sense of fun. They are unmindful of the fact that they are surrounded by a “sea of dying Russians” (Nazi treatment of Soviet war prisoners, as the novel correctly points out, was quasi-genocidal). They are contemptuous of the exhausted American prisoners, who have endured far worse combat and captivity conditions than they ever experienced. In a devastatingly comic remark, Vonnegut points out that the German guards hold the British in high regard because they embody the concept of chivalrous warfare they endorse themselves. This nostalgic vision of war is entirely spurious from an existential perspective: it is a fantasy Germans cling to in order to ignore the atrocities they commit themselves. Most officers or war apologists in the novel adopt a similar attitude.
Billy Pilgrim’s family: their affluent environment is predicated on the denial of the underside of violence on which their lifestyle relies. Symptomatically, they expect the comforts of consumerism to soothe existential anxiety: Billy and his wife buy a massaging bed called “Magic Fingers,” massaging them to sleep (45). In a less comic perspective, the fact that Billy’s son signs up to become a Green Beret fighting in Vietnam is evidence that he is unaware of the existential meaning of war.
Billy Pilgrim: If the novel is read from the perspective of psychological realism, the mechanism by which Billy becomes “unstuck in time “is a clear symptom of psychosis. His psychosis allows him to protect himself against both the experience of war and the traumatic memories thereof. Symptomatically, his first episode of psychic disjunction takes place during the Battle of the Bulge. During his postwar life, he creates a fantasy world for himself—the science-fiction-derived hallucination of his abduction to planet Tralfamadore. Quite appropriately, the Tralfamadorians’ world view (in fact their perception of time) offers remedies against trauma: Tralfamadorians have the capacity to focus on happy moments and shut out painful ones.
It might seem inappropriate to regard Billy’s madness as a variety of existential escapism: Billy can of course not be held responsible for his condition. Still, the very purpose of his psychosis is the illusory repression of trauma. This is made clear notably by the hallucination scene in which Billy, nearly dying of flu, imagines he is an ice-skater carryings out perfectly graceful skating figures.
Paul Lazzaro: this character responds to the absurdity of the world by taking on an attitude of indiscriminate, murderous rage. This stance is as ineffective as Billy’s psychotic naiveté or as the existential hypocrisy of militarists.
2.3.3.2.4.3 Existentialist Comedy: The Grotesque, Black Humor
In a few existentialist novels—Sartre’s Nausea [1938], Albert Camus’s The Plague [1947], Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls—protagonists confront the absurd with stoic courage or even actively fight against it. Postmodernist novels of the 1960s on the contrary feature Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 187 protagonists so overwhelmed by their world’s meaninglessness that they are reduced to the status of grotesque, powerless puppets. Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim perfectly embodies this type of characterization, as do most secondary characters of Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 or of Pynchon’s early novels. Vonnegut explicitly links this grotesque characterization to the anti- war tenor of SH5: he mentions that “there are almost no characters in this story” (119). Indeed, the war context as Vonnegut depicts it leaves no room for the type of consistent, well-rounded protagonists one expects to find in heroic narratives. Characters that aspire to psychological and moral consistency—Derby, for instance—fare poorly in SH5: Derby is executed for a trifle20. Billy Pilgrim’s anti-heroic dimension is ironically pointed out by the fact that his story begins with the word “Listen!”—the phrase introducing such medieval epics as Beowulf. Likewise, the novel is presented as the ironical account of a crusade—a “Children’s Crusade,” that is.
Thoroughly dehumanized protagonists like Billy Pilgrim are meant to act out the absurdity of society and world, not to confront it. They are existential clowns, puppets at the mercy of forces they cannot control. Such anti-heroes function therefore as the pivots of postmodernist cynical black humor. The clownish nature of Billy Pilgrim is signified in many passages of the novel, notably through the fact that he is inevitably given ridiculous, inadequate clothes: the prison guards give him a fur-lined coat far too small for him (65); he is obliged to wear Cinderella boots previously used by English prisoners for a theatrical performance (105, 109). By the same token, Vonnegut often implicitly compares war to a grotesque theatrical or filmic performance: German military authorities even re-enact the capture of American war prisoners for the purposes of a propaganda film. Howard W. Campbell, as the leader of the pro-nazi Abraham Lincoln Brigade, fashions for himself a uniform resembling a circus outfit. In one of the most successfully grotesque passages of the novel, the German guards’ response to the devastation of Dresden is compared to the facial mimics of a barbershop quartet, as if it were a mere performance.
2.3.3.2.5 A political Counternarrative
Like many postmodern novels, SH5 develops a political counternarrative: it articulates a political thesis that runs counter to established ideology, even to the established beliefs of progressive or left-wing parties. We will see below that counternarratives are common in the subgenre of postmodernist literature called historiographical metafiction (2.3.4.2). The counternarratives of historiographical metafiction usually provide a refocalized vision of historical events: they survey history from an unfamiliar perspective, often from the point of view of subaltern groups (see 2.3.4.2.2.2). In the present case, SH5 refocalizes the vision of WWII constructed by official historians or by war films (see 2.3.3.2.3).
The counternarrative of SH5 focuses on atrocities committed by Allied forces during WWII, specifically mass bombings of civilians. Until the 1960s, debates in this matter focused mainly on the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Vonnegut’s novel points out that conventional bombings could be almost as deadly. The worst form of conventional bombing, the novel points out, used a mixture of explosives and incendiary bombs in order to trigger a fire storm able to destroy a whole city. Firestorm bombing was used in Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo (73, 137). Fifty-thousand people died in Hamburg, while the bombing of the Japanese capital killed 80,000 people in one day. Vonnegut mentions 135,000 victims at Dresden—a figure higher than official estimates (40,000 dead). Whatever the figures,
20 It would be interesting to compare the latter character with the Tom Hanks protagonist of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan [1998]: similar good will, very different fate. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 188
Vonnegut’s gesture is significant in so far as it addresses an issue that was largely ignored. The case of Dresden is particularly embarrassing for Allied authorities: the city was regarded as a wonder of baroque art (the Florence of the Elbe); it did not have a clear military value. Worse still, the city was crowded with civilian refugees fleeing the Soviet advance on the eastern front. There have been suspicions that the bombing was organized mostly to warn Stalin, at that time still an ally of Britain and the USA, about the destructive potential of the British and American air forces.
It is of course important to point out that Vonnegut’s antiwar novel, published in 1969, was bound to be interpreted as an indirect protest against the American intervention in Vietnam. Symptomatically, Billy’s son is a Green Beret eager to leave for East Asia, and other characters in the novel champion the bombing of North Vietnam (43). As such, SH5 ranks as one of the early cultural works—one thinks of Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night [1968] or Robert Altman’s film M.A.S.H.—lending their support to the mounting protest against the war.
Admittedly, Vonnegut, as a German-American author, must steer a delicate course in his critique of Allied military action. The novel makes clear that the author—a left-wing pacifist—does not wish to downplay Nazi atrocities: the text does mention the holocaust and the mistreatment of war prisoners. Its moral sensibility often manifests itself in the form of a sentimental variety of humanism (see the scene in which Billy cries at being reminded that his fellow soldiers have mistreated their horse [143]). Still, the novel’s narrative format precludes any extensive account of Nazi crimes: its narrative of the war is focalized from Billy Pilgrim’s perspective, which roughly corresponds to Vonnegut’s own war experience. The latter joined the war at a fairly late stage and the only military actions he witnessed were the Battle of the Bulge and indeed the Dresden bombing. Overall, one may also argue that radical antimilitarism of the kind advocated by Vonnegut is inadequate to the politics of WWII: unlike WWI, the struggle against Nazism could not be avoided: Nazi Germany took the initiative of attacking all its neighbors—Czecho-Slovakia, Poland, Belgium, The Netherlands, Norway …). Fighting Nazism was therefore regarded by many as a political and moral obligation. In a cruelly ironical twist, which Vonnegut no doubt would have deplored, protest against the Dresden bombing has become a cause célèbre for early-twenty- first-century German neo-nazis. 21
2.3.3.2.6 A Postmodernist Heterotopia?
The present discussion of SH5 has so far obeyed a logic similar to that of psychological realism: we have assumed that Billy Pilgrim’s capacity to become “unstuck in time” is a symptom of mental disease and that the novel explores the causes of his delirium. This reading choice might, however, be suspected of repressing the postmodernist logic of the novel. In Postmodernist Fiction, Brian McHale argues that postmodernist writing generates heterotopias. This term, borrowed from Michel Foucault, designates a field of experience or a text composed of several, interwoven or overlapping worlds. In a heterotopia, several world views coexist and no single world view is allowed to gain dominance over the others.
21 Embarrassingly, some of the historical information Vonnegut relies on for the Dresden bombing is derived from an essay by David Irving, a British historian who in later decades turned into one of the leading holocaust deniers. Given Irving’s political bias, one may entertain some doubt over the casualty figure of 135,000 Dreden dead mentioned in his essay. Irving’s personality is at the center of Mick Jackson’s film Denial [2016], which chronicles the defamation suit Irving lost against American academic Deborah Lipstadt, played in the film by British actress Rachel Weisz. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 189
In Bakhtinian terms, heterotopias are fully dialogical: they reject monologism—the reduction of experience and writing to a single norm or discourse. The concept of the heterotopia is evidently relevant to magic realism, a genre that depicts worlds in which several epistemological norms coexist. It is also relevant to science fiction, a genre where characters visit worlds starkly different from their own. McHale argues accordingly that SF is a crucially important genre for postmodern writing. Note that the term heterotopia carries strongly positive overtones in postmodernism: plurality and diversity are at the heart of postmodern politics, whereas monologism is associated with repression.
In this perspective, one should wonder whether SH5 might not encourage us to view Billy’s temporal experience as well as his extra-terrestrial abduction stories as legitimate manifestations of a world view different from what passes as normal in late-twentieth-century America. To some extent, the novel encourages such a postmodernist reading: its depiction of the Tralfamadorian world view is inspired by the Sapir/Whorf hypothesis—the theory according to which our perception of the world is shaped by our language systems, and is therefore inherently relative. In this view, there would be no legitimate argument disproving the Tralfamadorian view of time, nor would it be possible to regard Billy as insane. Vonnegut, who was trained as an anthropologist, is evidently aware of these relativistic theories: he alludes to them in several of his novels.
Accordingly, SH5 toys with the epistemological indeterminacy surrounding Billy’s relation to time and his tale of extraterrestrial abduction. In a few passages, Billy’s unique world view seems to make him more enlightened than his acquaintances or family members. His daughter, for instance, is placed in the unpleasant position of a rational person having to reason with a madman—a role often pictured negatively in twentieth-century fiction and film (see Ken Kesey’s / Milos Forman’s One Flew over a Cuckoo’s Nest [1962/1975]). Still, there are also a few elements in the novel suggesting that Billy’s time traveling must be interpreted as a delusion:
. The Tralfamadorian experience has the value of a therapeutic fantasy, comparable to all the compensatory dreams depicted in the novel. As such, it ranks as a manifestation of existential inauthenticity. Symptomatically, Tralfamadorian wisdom is rather simplistic: just focus on the better moments, ignore moments of suffering—the very logic of existential hypocrisy (see 2.3.3.2.4.2.2). It is no coincidence that Vonnegut should include within Tralfamadorian philosophy a ludicrous narrative of apocalypse—an element that makes it difficult to take their wisdom seriously.
. There is considerable irony in the scenes depicting Billy and Montana Wildhack in the Tralfamadorian human zoo. They live in an environment resembling a stereotypical American suburban household, with furniture bought from Sears and Roebuck. The whole setup could be regarded as an sf metaphor of suburban life—a loving couple surrounded by an unfamiliar world (extra-terrestrials, in this case). Irony of this type undercuts the customary seriousness of classic sf, however.
. By the end of the novel, readers are given many elements allowing them to explain in realistic fashion how Billy’s delirium developed: the protagonist borrowed aspects of his real-life environment in order to flesh out his Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 190
psychotic world: he found Tralfamadore in a Kilgore Trout novel; Montana Wildhack is a porn star whose image he saw in a porn book shop ...
In view of this, we might be led to argue that SH5 falls short of qualifying as a full-fledged postmodern novel. However, such a gesture would smack of theoretical dogmatism: it would overlook the fact that in 1969, the concept of postmodernist fiction had not yet been elaborated, or that literature does not have to conform to critical definitions.
Julian Barnes 191
2.3.4. Julian BARNES [b. 1946]
Figure 190: Julian Barnes
2.3.4.1 Postmodernist Fiction in Britain
The impact of postmodernism on British fiction has been less visible than on American writers: English novelists have often been reluctant to endorse movement labels or to join literary schools. Accordingly, they approached postmodernist writing more reluctantly than their transatlantic counterparts. Unlike in the U.S, it is more difficult in the context of British letters to distinguish between highly recognizable “generations” of postmodern writers (see below, Pynchon 5.1; 5.2). This situation is, of course, due to the specific development of fiction in post-WWII Britain:
. Post-WWII British literature experienced a revival of realism, both in the fields of fiction and drama. In the mid-1950s and early 1960s, the dominant movement in British culture was the group of writers called “The Angry Young Men”— Alan Sillitoe (“The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” [1959], Saturday Night, Sunday Morning [1958]); John Braine (Room at the Top [1957]); Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim [1954]), John Osborne (Look Back in Anger [1956]). The very name of this group connotes the rebellious spirit of the sixties: the formula itself would indeed prove inspiring to British rock songwriters like David Bowie, Pete Townshend or Paul Weller. Yet in many respects, the “angry young men” were not deeply radical or experimental authors. In their oppositional moments, they produced literature that revived the socially oriented realism of the early-twentieth century or of the 1930s—George Bernard Shaw, George Orwell. In this, they wanted to give voice to the frustrations of young intellectuals with working-class origins—a project best illustrated in Sillitoe’s works. Simultaneously, however, their movement marked a rather narrow- minded response to modernism, which had by then become the literature of choice for university-educated readers. This anti-modernist attitude was accompanied by anti-metropolitan feelings, since many of the “angry young men” came from the provinces, and defined themselves negatively toward London intellectuals. Characteristically, some of the main figures of the movement (Osborne, Amis) quickly gave up their rebellious stance and became supporters of the Conservative Party.
. The realism of the Angry Young Men existed alongside a rather diffuse neo- modernist current, best embodied by writers like William Golding (Lord of the Flies [1954]; The Inheritors [1955]; The Spire [1964]), Iris Murdoch (Under the Net [1954]), Muriel Spark (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie [1961]) or John Fowles (The Magus [1966]; The Collector [1963]). The modernist tendencies of these writers manifested themselves, for instance, by a predilection for mythological narrative, and allegories, often with psychoanalytical resonances. In their later career, these writers wrote postmodern works as well Julian Barnes 192
. The novel was not the dominant cultural medium in Britain from the 1950s to the 1970s. Drama was far more influential, with such world-famous figures as Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Arnold Wesker, and David Hare.
. British literary criticism until the late-1970s and early-’80s remained rather staunchly anti-theoretical. It perpetuated the liberal-humanist tradition of F. R. Leavis, which was not propitious to a theoretically literate form of writing like postmodernism. This anti-theoretical outlook manifests itself in novels by critics/ novelists David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury: while they both admired modernist literature, they were skeptical of poststructuralism and postmodernism and satirized the new movement in their novels of academic life (cf. Bradbury’s novel My Strange Quest for Henri Mensonge, Structuralism’s Hidden Hero [1987] and Lodge’s Nice Work [1988]).
In this context, postmodernism was greeted not as a new world view that requires the writer’s full endorsement, but rather as a literary style whose techniques can be borrowed piecemeal. As of the 1960s, some of the neomodernist writers (Fowles, Murdoch, Spark) started using metafictional devices in their works. By the 1970s and 1980s, new authors emerged—Angela Carter (The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffmann [1972], Nights at the Circus [1984]), A.S. Byatt (The Virgin in the Garden [1978]); Graham Swift (Waterland [1983]), Julian Barnes—whose affiliation with postmodernism is more explicit. The decisive breakthrough of postmodern writing in Britain came in fact with the growing popularity of postcolonial literature—illustrated, notably, in the work of Salman Rushdie (Midgnight’s Children [1981]).
After the 1980s, the English novel managed to reassert itself as an influential medium. With such authors as Zadie Smith (White Teeth [2000]), Ian McEwan (Atonement [2001]) David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas [2004]), it has reverted to a variety of realism that integrates the input of both modernism and postmodernism.
2.3.4.2. Historiographic Metafiction / Metahistorical Romances
2.3.4.2.1 The Status of History in Postmodern Culture
P. 242 "History isn’t what happened. History is just what historians tells us."22
Beyond its playful, comic dimension, A History of the World in 10 and ½ Chapters, like other works by Barnes, raises the question of the proper representation of history in postmodern texts. This is an issue that has preoccupied several theoreticians and writers.23 The basic problem is the following: if, as poststructuralist theory suggests, language cannot be fully referential—if it cannot provide a reliable description of extralinguistic reality— then it cannot represent the past by means of significant historical narratives. It is as if the
22 Page references are to the following edition: Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, 1989, London: Picador-Macmillan-Jonathan Cape, 1990. 23 See Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), 85-130; Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, 17-22. Julian Barnes 193 past were lost—at least lost to linguistic representation. More accurately, the main thing that is lost in postmodernism, is the unchallengeable, commonsense relation that might exist between historical texts and what they describe. In this logic, any historical or literary account is suspected of distorting what it claims to portray because it has to obey the structure of language, not the “realness” of the real.
P. 242 "There was a pattern, a plan, a movement, expansion, the march of democracy ... a flow of events, a complex narrative, connected, explicable ... but all the time it’s connections, progress, meaning, this led to this ...”
Secondly, another crucial element that seems to disappear in postmodern discourse is the sense of logical, rational change, or, more technically, what we might call the “principle of development” of historical narratives—their inner dynamic. For some historians, it is indeed crucial to grasp how events evolve—how one situation leads to another. This basic logic of history constitutes its deepest level, as it were; it is almost a mystical principle, which can be grasped only if we enjoy a knowledge of absolute realities. This conception of history—i.e. teleological history (history that evolves towards a pre- appointed goal)—is best illustrated in Hegel and Marx, who believed that historical change was brought about by a deep-seated logic that philosophers should strive to discern. Liberal historians too believed in a principle of change—progress, both material and moral. The essential logic of history is, of course, something that must remain outside of language, at least if we view language along poststructuralist lines. Consequently, postmodernist texts are by definition unable to do justice to it. From a postmodern perspective, it is indeed impossible to decree that history unfolds according to one essential logic—one privileged scenario, as the concept of a “principle of development” implies.
P. 242 “... we fabulate. We make up a story to cover the facts we don’t know or can’t accept; we keep a few true facts and spin a new story round them.”
Against the idea of a teleological development (history with a purpose), postmodern writers favor the hypothesis that history is only a tangle of stories, narrated from different perspectives, by different story-tellers with divergent ideological interests. In short, history is just a plurality of stories. Such stories, Jean-François Lyotard argues, are “narratives of legitimation” (‘grands récits’) (see 1.1.2.3): they are the tales told by each human group— stories used assert the group’s own power and belief systems. They are meant to make sense of a temporal development that can in fact not be reduced to smooth narratives. What is lost in this relativist view of history is, however, the sense of vital, inevitable change: the image of a plurality of historical scripts is indeed irreconcilable with the feeling that history evolves irremediably in one direction.
P. 242 "And we cling to history as a series of salon pictures ...”
From what precedes, we might be led to conclude that postmodern culture and fiction give up on history altogether. It is obviously not so. In fact, among postmodern critics, there have been at least two opposite ways of envisaging the status history and historiography in contemporary texts: a pessimistic one, articulated by Fredric Jameson, and a more positive one, developed by Linda Hutcheon in her theory of historiographic metafiction.
Julian Barnes 194
. Jameson is indeed one of the theoreticians who believe that postmodern culture entails the loss of a lived sense of the past—a development that, as a Marxist, he strongly deplores. Accordingly, he identifies symptoms within American culture—movies, literature, television—indicating that history is being reduced to “a vast collection” of interchangeable images—“a multitudinous photographic simulacrum” (Jameson, Postmodernism 18). In movies, for instance, Jameson identifies a genre that he calls “nostalgia films” [figs 191-98], in which the past is not narrated, but only connoted intertextually by means of visual pastiche—of images borrowed from other films. For instance, the genre we now call neo-noir offers films (Polanski’s Chinatown [1974], Joel and Ethan Coen’s Miller’s Crossing [1990], Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential [1997]) that are nominally set in the past, but in a past that is only a Hollywood image: the aim of these movies is more to evoke a genre (1930s to 1950s film noir) than to narrate the past. Conversely, films set in the present may be made to evoke the imagery of the past. Jameson’s main example for this is Lawrence Kasdan’s thriller Body Heat [1981]—a remake of Billy Wilder’s 1950s film noir Double Indemnity [1944] (Jameson, Postmodernism 19). This movie is nominally set in the present, but its settings seem to evoke the 1950s—the period in which Double Indemnity was made. In this process, past and present seem to merge. Likewise, Jameson argues that contemporary historical novels—E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime [1975], for instance—no longer manage to offer a sense of historical development because their references to historical figures automatically acquire an intertextual resonance: by portraying President Theodore Roosevelt or anarchist activist Emma Goldmann in Ragtime, Doctorow does not introduce into his text characters that could act as full-fledged narrative actors but merely famous names whose significance is by now entirely coded by cultural discourses existing outside of the novel.
Figures 191-198: nostalgia films: neo-noir thrillers from the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s—Roman Polanski’s Chinatown [1974], Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner [1982], Brian Helgland’s Payback [1999] adopt a visual style deliberately evocative of film noir classics such as John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon [1941] or Howard Hawk’s The Big Sleep [1946].
Figures 190-91: credit sequences from The Maltese Falcon [1941] and Chinatown [1974]. The sepia-toned credits of Chinatown evoke the graphics of the Hollywood past. Julian Barnes 195
Figures 193-94: office scenes in The Maltese Falcon [1941] and in Payback [1999]. Note that the setting in The Maltese Falcon is meant to be contemporary, even modern: 1940s viewers would recognize their own world. The plot of Payback is set in the 1990s but the visual style is strictly 1940s.
Figures 195-96: the private investigator (Humphrey Bogart) and his rich client (Lauren Bacall) in The Big Sleep [1946]; a similar pair of characters (Faye Dunaway and Jack Nicholson) in Chinatown.
Figures 197-98: noir private investigators in their customary surroundings—Bogart in The Big Sleep, Harrison Ford in Blade Runner. Ironically, the plot of SF thriller Blade Runner [1982] is set in 2019.
. On the contrary, Linda Hutcheon argues that history is far from a residual concern in postmodern fiction. A high number of postwar novels deal with historical topics. They form a sub-genre that Hutcheon calls “historiographic metafiction.” This form of fiction, which other critics call metahistorical romance, focuses on a historical topic and simultaneously comments on the literary strategies by which historical narratives (including the text’s own account of the past) can be established (Hutcheon 105-140). Here are a few examples of historiographic metafiction: Julian Barnes 196
John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman [1969]: This novel is set in the late Victorian age, yet it contains a woman protagonist whose desire for emancipation seems typical of the mid-twentieth century. This deliberate anachronism constitutes one among several devices through which the author comments on the constraints that bear upon his own depiction of Victorianism.
Robert Coover’s The Public Burning [1977]: This novel focuses on the early-1950s Rosenberg case (Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were suspected of passing on nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union and were executed). Coover uses Richard Nixon—a prominent supporter of McCarthyism—as his narrator.
Toni Morrison’s Beloved [1987]; Song of Solomon [1977]; Sula [1974]: Morrison portrays the history of African-Americans in an idiom that mingles realism and fantasy—magical realism.
Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow [1973]; Vineland [1990]; Mason & Dixon [1997]: These works by Pynchon are, in some respect, historical novels: each of them focuses on a specific period of the past (WWII, the American 1960s; the late-18th century) and represent this period by intertextual techniques. Mason & Dixon, notably is written in the idiom of eighteenth-century fiction.
William Gibson’s and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine [1990]: In this text, Gibson and Sterling mix historiographic metafiction and cyberpunk science fiction (see 4.4): they imagine an alternative 19th-century past in which Romantic poet Byron has become Prime Minister and encourages a ruthless program of industrialization. The widespread use of steam-driven computers leads to an environmental disaster.
Thus, for Hutcheon,, there is no such thing as a disappearance of history in postmodern culture. Instead, our sense of history has changed, from an emphasis on referential accuracy and irreversible change to a new concern for the discourse of history itself—for its intertextual logic and its ideological orientation.
Julian Barnes 197
2.3.4.2.2 Specific Concerns of Historiographic Metafiction
2.3.4.2.2.1 The Elusive Line between Historical Narrative and Fiction
One central issue in historiographic metafiction is the difficulty in separating literature from history. Indeed, once we no longer trust the referentiality of historical discourse (its ability to ‘designate the real’), we may be led to believe that history becomes indistinguishable from fiction (cf. Lyotard’s ‘grands récits’ hypothesis). This skepticism may sound typically postmodern, yet, if we take a closer look at the history both of the novel and of historiography itself, we realize that these two fields have long been interrelated:
. Before the 19th century, history and literature had the same cultural purpose: moral instruction. Students were encouraged to read ancient historians (Roman historian Plutarch, for instance), in order to find inspiration for the shaping of their own characters—and not out of any “scientific” concern for the past. Fiction was supposed to work along the same lines.
. Walter Scott’s early-nineteenth-century historical romances (Ivanhoe [1819], Quentin Durward [1823]) were hugely influential, and served as stylistic models for nineteenth-century historians. Indeed, to a contemporary reader mid-19th-c. French historian Jules Michelet’s Histoire de la révolution française [1847-53] has an obvious romantic ring. Likewise, we could argue that Hegel’s model of historical development is an offshoot of the romantic era.
. Mid- and late-nineteenth-century realist or naturalist writers—George Eliot (Romola [1863]), Gustave Flaubert (Salammbô [1862]), Emile Zola (Les Rougon-Macquart [1871-93])— used documentary techniques (on-site note-taking, sociological documentation) very similar to the procedures adopted by professional historians. Likewise, critics influenced by (post)structuralism—Roland Barthes (Le degré zéro de l’écriture) [1953], David Lodge (The Modes of Modern Writing [1977])—contend that realism can be defined as a literary idiom that follows the principles of verisimilitude of historiography.
. Literary historians of the 1980s and ’90s—notably the American New Historicists (Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Benn Michaels, Catherine Gallagher) tend to handle historical and sociological sources exactly as they do literary texts. According to them, it is impossible to draw a sharp distinction between supposedly objective historical accounts and fictions: all of these texts are shaped by similar discursive and semiotic mechanisms. This approach developed under the direct influence of French poststructuralist historian of culture Michel Foucault.
Julian Barnes 198
2.3.4.2.2.2 Ideological Refocalization
Another essential concern of historiographic metafiction is what we might call ideological refocalization and de-centering. Contemporary writers—particularly feminists and advocates of minority rights—have emphasized the fact that dominant history has usually been narrated from the point-of-view of the center—that is, of dominant groups. It has been ideologically focalized [oriented] in such a way as to reflect the concerns of these dominant groups and to protect their interests. There arises therefore the need to narrate other histories no longer from the center but from the margins—from the perspective of historical actors who have been silenced. Historiographic metafiction has therefore produced a fair number of works based on a reversal of point-of-view—for instance by retelling well-known stories from a novel angle:
. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea [1966] reverses the logic of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre [1847] by telling the story of male protagonist Rochester’s first wife. This character appears in Brontë’s novel only as a mysterious and frightening madwoman locked up in a manor’s attic. Rhys’s text provides, in modernist form, an internally focalized account of her psychological development, leading to her failed marriage to Rochester, a rigid and insensitive colonial landlord, and her surrender to mental alienation. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic [1979] explores this thematics from a theoretical perspective.
. J.M. Coetzee, in Foe [1986] rewrites the Robinson Crusoe story: in his novel, it is a woman, Susan Barton, who was the original traveller whose experiences are reported—of course, from a male perspective— in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe [1719].
. Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia [1986] offers a view of literary and scientific culture in the romantic period focalized primarily from the point-of-view of feminine characters, and no longer from the egotist male perspective of poets like Byron. In this play, characteristically, Byron is only a minor character, who barely appears on stage.
Many postcolonial novels are, of course, based on similar reversals of perspective. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart [1958] describes the impact of colonization on a Nigerian village. The novel is narrated from the point-of-view of Okonkwo, an important man in his village, whose status and cultural values will not resist the progressive establishment of a colonial regime.
Julian Barnes 199
2.3.4.3 Julian Barnes's Biography24
Figure 199: Julian Barnes
Julian Barnes was born in Leicester on January 19, 1946. Both his parents were French teachers. After graduation from Magdalen College, Oxford in 1968 (B. A. degree in modern languages) he took on a job as lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary Supplement in what Barnes himself later called the “sports and dirty words department”. In 1972 Barnes became a free-lance writer, and the years following saw a number of reviews, articles, and columns published under his name as well as under various pseudonyms (PC49, Fat Jeff, Edward Pygge). The range of magazines he contributed to was as wide as his range of topics. Barnes wrote among others for the Times Literature Supplement, the Tatler, and the Observer; he wrote on literature, on the arts, became a television critic - and a restaurant critic. At that time he was also part of the staff of the New Statesman and the Sunday Times.
Barnes’s first novel was published in 1980 under another pseudonym, Dan Kavanagh. Duffy was the first in a series of detective novels which were to be published throughout the 1980s (Fiddle City [1981]; Putting the Boat in [1985]; Going to the Dogs, [1987]). Still in the same year Barnes published his first novel under his own name, Metroland. Greeted with mixed critical acclaim, it still earned the Maugham Award in 1981. In 1982, he published his second novel Before She Met Me. With the third novel published under his own name, the experimental Flaubert’s Parrot [1984], Barnes received considerable praise from critics and public alike. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Barnes enjoyed continued success with a string of novels, Staring at the Sun [1986], A History of the World in 10 and 1/2 Chapters [1989], Talking It Over [1991], The Porcupine [1992], In all these novels Barnes has pursued a number of highly diverse styles and themes. Although by now a fulltime writer, Barnes is still active as a journalist and columnist. The nineties saw him emerge as London correspondent for the New Yorker. A selection of these reports on modern Britain has been published as Letters from London in 1995. On top of this, he enjoyed a short spell as teacher for creative writing at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. His recent publications include Cross Channel [1996], a collection of inter-related short stories, exploring the theme of French-British relationships throughout the centuries, England, England [1998], a novel about the creation of a huge amusement park recreating the whole of English culture, and Arthur and George, which chronicles Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's efforts at saving the reputation of a young man of Indian origin, falsely accused of practicing animal mutilations.
24 The following biography is based on the following sources: Sullivan, Mary Rose. “Julian Barnes” in Cyclopedia of World Authors II. Frank N. Magill, ed U S A 1989. pp. 132-133; Brown, Richard. “Julian Barnes” in Contemporary Novelists Chicago: St. James Press, 1991. pp. 78-80; “Barnes, Julian” in Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series Volume 19, pp. 55; “Barnes, Julian” Contemporarv Authors. Volume 102. Julian Barnes 200
Fiction: Metroland [1980]. Before She Met Me [1982]. Flaubert ‘s Parrot [1984]. Staring at the Sun. London [1986] A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters [1989] Talking It Over [1991] The Porcupine [1992] Cross Chanel [1996] England, England [1998] Arthur and George [2005]
As Dan Kavanagh: Duffy [1980] Fiddle City [1981] Putting the Boat in [1985] Going to the Dogs [1987]
2.3.4.4 A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters
2.3.4.4.1 Ostensibly, a playful approach to history
P. 72 “... was the woodworm ever upon Noah’s Ark?"
P. 258 “... just as they were nearing Kitty Hawk, he saw the Ark by the side of the road ..."
P. 184 "But how would you choose the 250 who were to be allowed off the Ark?"
Before even opening Barnes’s History, we feel that the novel offers an ironical, witty approach to history. The book’s very title is indeed reminiscent of textbooks for children. In an obviously ironical gesture, the author seems to be claiming that such a huge subject can be squeezed into a book whose size is by definition inappropriate. Then, there is the added enigma of the half chapter—a mysterious addition whose nature is revealed only to those who peruse the whole text.
As we start reading the different stories that make up the book, we realize that the author has chosen to play a metafictional game with his readers. Behind the chapters’ rather unrevealing titles, we discover stories that are set at widely different periods, written in widely diverging styles:
. An animal tale (“Stowaway”) . The minutes of an ecclesiastical trial (“Wars”) . A story of mental alienation, in the “kitchen-sink-realism” style (“Survivor”) . A modernist ‘epiphany’ story, reminiscent of E.M. Forster’s Passage to India (“Mountain”). Julian Barnes 201
. An historical narrative (“Simple Stories, 3”) . An art history paper (“Shipwreck”) . A moralist’s essay (“Parenthesis”—the “half” chapter) . Postmodern black humor (“Project Ararat”) . A dream allegory (“Dream”)
In spite of their diversity, these story share one common characteristic: their connection to the Biblical story of Noah’s Ark (“Genesis,” vi-ix). As we proceed, we come to look forward for ever new, ever more eccentric allusions to the Ark. Thus, the game Barnes plays could be characterized as such—to narrate the whole of human history (or at least as many varied aspects of it as can be reviewed in a 300-page text) by means of one single narrative pattern—the story of the Deluge. In technical terms, we might say that Barnes follows the logic of Lyotard’s grands récits to absurd lengths: he obliges us to envisage a world in which the diversity of the past can be reduced to one single story line. Since metafictional games in postmodern fiction usually have a serious side (cf. Borges, Beckett, Pynchon), we may assume that Barnes chose this narrative kernel carefully—that this basic pattern is rich enough to be able to be reinscribed in many different contexts. Here is a list of the core components of Noah’s story, which the author reshuffles constantly:
. A catastrophe: initially the Deluge; reinscribed as a nuclear accident (“Survivor”), a terrorist attack (“Visitors”), Nazism (“Simple Stories, 3”), a shipwreck (“Shipwreck”), a woodworm-infested ceremonial seat (“Wars of Religion”) ...
. A thematics of contract: initially, the contract is the covenant between God and Noah, preserving God’s faithful subjects against new catastrophes. This initial contract is reiterated as Miss Ferguson’s promise to reach the summit of Mount Ararat (“Mountain”); as astronaut Spike Tiggler’s commitment to locate the Ark (“Project Ararat”); more pessimistically, in the negotiations between Jewish immigrants on the St Louis and government authorities (“Simple Stories, 3”); or also in the Santa Euphemia terrorists’ legalistic turn of mind ("Visitors").
. Selection and segregation: this is the negative part of the contract: only selected groups will be allowed to make a deal with God; the others are excluded; they are the “unclean” as opposed to the “clean.” In “Survivor,” the narrator’s decision to escape from an alleged environmental disaster on an improvised ark is a gesture of self-selection, as it were—a gesture that includes the two cats she takes on board. The situation is ironically reversed in “Simple Stories, 3,” where the Jews quarantined on the St Louis are actually the excluded, the unclean. The shipwrecked sailors on the Medusa’s raft throw the sick overboard. The terrorists on the Santa Euphemia handle their hostages in a similar way, for other reasons. To Miss Fergusson, in “Mountain,” the earthquake victims on Mount Ararat are legitimately cast away by God, who must disapprove of their profligacy (they drink wine produced by Noah’s vineyard).
. The persistence of evil, or at least of a negative principle beyond human (and possibly divine) control. This is the part played, literally or metaphorically, by the woodworm: whatever the semblance of security promised by the contract with Julian Barnes 202
god, something wrong will occur. This is best illustrated in “Wars” where the French villagers’ insistence on their legal rights—on the agreement they have made with the divinity—prove helpless in the face of a form of destruction for which even the Bible makes no provision: the woodworm was not supposed to be on the Ark.
2.3.4.4.2. Focalization, Unreliable Voices, and Undecidability
The subversive impact of historiographic metafiction is obtained by applying conspicuously literary techniques (i.e., usually, modernist ones) to a historical narrative that is expected to follow the verisimilitude of realism. This is indeed the basis of the technique of “refocalization” or “decentered point-of-view” favored by authors of metafictional texts. The manipulation of narrative point-of-view (of “focalization”) was one of the main contributions of Anglo-Saxon modernism to the twentieth-century novel: authors like Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner often wrote novels whose fictional world was described from a subjective perspective—often a very limited or biased one: the first part of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is a stream-of-consciousness account focalized from within the mind of a retarded boy. The predilection for subjective or psychologically eccentric focalization expressed the modernists’ belief that a purely objective, omniscient description of the world is impossible.
We have seen above that authors of historiographic metafiction—Jean Rhys, John Fowles—subject historical events to a form of “refocalization” or “decentering” that is politically motivated (see 4.2.2): they rewrite history from the perspective of the underdog. On first inspection, Barnes’s handling of focalization seems to emulate this political logic. We will see, however, that what prevails in his narrative method is ultimately less the need to take political sides than a skeptical existential stance: his stories suggest that any historical narrative must be subjective, and that the historical real remains undecidable. This skepticism is established early on in the book, in the story about the stowaway woodworm:
P. 4 "I was specifically not chosen. I was a stowaway"
P. 11 "... give vent to the outcast’s laugh"
On the face of if, “Stowaway” gives voice to the underdog—the woodworm, who was not meant to survive the deluge, and was therefore lower in status than the “unclean” animals on the Ark. The story is, of course, deliberately comic and even absurd. Barnes embellishes this reverse account of Noah’s story with all kinds of witty anecdotes about unknown animals who never made it to the end of the journey, or with what we might call ‘alternative etiological narratives’—stories of origins we had never heard before. Thus, we learn of the real origins of the zebra’s stripes (they are the traces of Noah’s whip), of the reason why the chameleon changes color (he was scared of Noah), or of the real nature of mythical animals like the basilisk (they were real, but Noah killed them). In spite of the obviously fanciful character of these anecdotes, we may still believe that this pseudo-mythological account serves to emphasize the legitimacy of the underdog’s voice and, from a literary point-of- view, of marginal or decentered focalization. In this sense, the main interxtual model for “Stowaway” would be radical history or ‘muckraking’ journalism (the form of investigative Julian Barnes 203 journalism that appeared in the early-twentieth-century US, and which was devoted to exposing scandals, to reveal what authorities attempted to conceal).
P. 4 "I feel no sense of obligation. Gratitude puts no smear of vaseline on the lens. My account you can trust"
P. 23 "I am merely reporting in a dispassionate way ..."
However, if we listen carefully to the woodworm’s voice, we soon realize that his stories are so subjective that they are in fact manipulative and biased. From a psychological point-of- view, he seems to be afflicted by the bitterness, even the jealousy of the outcast. We find echoes in his voice of the clichés of perpetual dissatisfaction, of perpetual griping, mixed with insistent self-praise:
P. 15 "Still, it had its rights like everyone else, didn’t it ... “
P. 23 "... and a jealous examination of ...
In order to make these negative connotations visible, we have to focus on tone, on delivery, on the structure of the voice. Barnes is an expert at imitating all kinds of styles and speech varieties. Symptomatically, for “Project Ararat” he used the help of an American collaborator in order to reproduce colloquial American speech. In the case of “Stowaway,” it would in fact be interesting to have a narrator with some degree of vulgarity in his voice (Michael Caine in his gangster’s cockney accent, for instance. This would bring out the burden of malevolent frustration that speaks through the woodworm’s text.
P. 21 "There’s one thing I want to make quite clear ... “
P. 19 "I am reporting what the birds said"
P. 23 "... we leave the harbour of fact for the high seas of rumour."
P. 23 “ ... though not officially confirmed"
P. 4 "Now, I realize that accounts differ ... “
P. 24 "The public explanation was quite different, of course."
Secondly, we must focus on the fact that a large part of the story is written in the register of gossip: this is tabloid history. Psychologically speaking, we understand that the woodworm needs to win us over to his side by offering us surprising revelations. In other words, the inside information provided here (the history of Noah’s fourth son Varadi; the criminal culinary practices of Noah’s family, the extent of Noah’s drunkenness) is all the more suspicious as it tends to establish a bond of complicity between the woodworm and ourselves as readers: we are the privileged recipients of secret knowledge, and this knowledge, in the logic of gossip, is supposedly the more trustworthy as it differs from official accounts. Yet the creature with whom this bond is created is far from reliable: it is as Julian Barnes 204 if the woodworm were all too eager to secure our trust by whispering manipulative information into his reader’s ears.
P. 30 "As I was saying, we were euphoric when we got off the Ark"
After having established that the woodworm’s voice is not psychologically reliable, we now have to face the apparently obvious (but easily overlooked) fact that the whole method of narration in “Stowaway” is utterly unrealistic. In other words, not only is the narrator’s voice biased, but it is also literally impossible. We might conceivably suspend our disbelief as far as accepting an animal narrator speaking like a human being and actually sharing his or her limitations (jealousy, manipulativeness). Still, difficult questions would arise, chief among which the identity of the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ that recurrently pop up in the text. How could an animal that, by Biblical chronology, was alive roughly 6000 years ago, still address us? Was the ‘I’ figure really on the Ark or is he (or she?) a contemporary woodworm speaking in the name of his or her whole species?
P. 10 "The divisiveness of God’s animal policy ..."
P. 21 "That God of his was a really oppressive role-model."
P. 10 "... but there’s a much simpler explanation for the puzzling leaps in the spectrum of creation.”
P. 30 "He made some bad navigational decisions"
Questions about the identity of the narrative voice become even more acute if we factor in the variety of linguistic registers used in “Stowaway:” the narrator’s voice is generated by a text that consists of a genuine interxtextual collage—fragments of discourse borrowed from all kinds of disciplines (the tabloids, left-wing politics; popular psychoanalysis; evolutionary science; management textbooks). In all cases, Barnes parodies contemporary styles, which means that the voice we hear is deliberately anachronistic.
We may infer from this that “Stowaway,” the first story in the book, acts as a sort of warning sign as far as narrative reliability is concerned. In a deliberately non-realistic, mode, it attracts our attention to the considerable degree of uncertainty that is introduced into a text by the adoption of focalized narration. As such, it displays with great clarity the sense of undecidability that is present, though sometimes less noticeably so, in the other chapters of History:
. The truth value of the events narrated in “Survivor” is ultimately impossible to fathom. The story is told alternatively as a 1st-person and as a third-person narrative, yet the point-of-view remains internally focalized throughout: we never learn anything substantial that Kath, the narrator, does not know (see 2.3.3.3.4.5.4). This means that we cannot test Kath’s knowledge against other people’s point-of-views. Simultaneously, we soon suspect that she may be psychologically unstable—paranoid, probably (she believes that “everything is connected,” which can be a symptom of paranoia see 2.3.3.3.4.5.2]). The story indeed resembles a naturalist account of mental alienation. We are therefore not Julian Barnes 205
surprised to discover that by the end of the story, the account of her adventure alternates with hospital scenes, which she herself interprets as nightmares. Clearly, truth must be on the side of the therapist. His matter-of-fact account of her escapade seems to make sense.
P. 109 "The technical term is fabulation."
P. 110 "I admire your fabulation."
. The therapist believes indeed that the narrator, in order to protect herself against stress, has invented a happy ending for an adventure that was veering towards disaster. Kath retorts, however, that for all she knows (thus, for all the readers know, since the story is internally focalized), the therapist’s version of events might be fabulation too. The story ends with Kath’s vision love and hope—a development whose reality status is totally undecidable.
P. 260 "How you sure it was God, honey?"
. Betty Tiggler’s question to her astronaut husband, as ironical as it may sound, remains open. There is no definite proof that God did not speak to Spike on the moon (of course, we only have the evidence of his own words). The failure of his first Ararat expedition does not in itself invalidate his project: it might succeed the second time.
P. 283 "I dreamt that I woke up. It’s the oldest dream of all, and I’ve just had it. I dreamt that I woke up.
P. 309 "I dreamt that I woke up. It’s the oldest dream of all, and I’ve just had it."
. In the first and last lines of “Dream,” a narrator reports his dream of waking up. This device completely shortcircuits the distinction between dream and reality: is this second occurrence uttered from within the dream? In other words, at the end of the story, is he restored to reality or caught up in still another dream? Several interpretations are possible, but none of them solves the paradox thus created:
The last sentence might be part of a narrative “frame:” it might not describe what happened during his last night in paradise; the narrator might merely be repeating the opening sentence as if here were obsessed by it or for the sake of symmetry. This makes us able to tell reality from fiction/dream. Yet the decision to separate off this last sentence from the dream narrative (to relegate it to the “frame”) is not backed up by corroborating evidence.
Is he really having the “wake-up” dream a second time, to find himself in the real world again? In this case, the story’s reality status is undecidable: he could either be restored to reality or be caught up in a dream within the dream.
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The meaning of “dream” in the second occurrence might be different than in the first. It could mean that “waking up (to reality? to a dream world?) is what people have always hoped for.”
P. 242 “... we fabulate."
Barnes’s History seems to settle for an acceptance of undecidability as far as the reliability of historical narratives is concerned: historiography is fabulation. This remains, however, an awkward position, to which Barnes himself will try to find his own solution (see below, 4.3.4: escaping from history). Against Barnes’s relativism, we may object that in spite of the undecidability of multiple subjective perceptions, history writing as a cultural practice must still assume that subjective narratives may in time converge toward a mutually-accepted version of history. In other words, historiography as a language game must start out from the belief that the convergence of point-of-views is not an empty goal. Traditional historians took this convergence too much for granted, which does not imply that it should now be rejected by dint of an equally dogmatic gesture of skepticism.
2.3.4.4.3 Historical Truth within the Constraints of Art
Besides manipulating focalization, Barnes shows on a more general plane that art and literature follow a logic that differs from our commonsense conception of realism and referentiality (the relation of language to the world). He does so by playfully underlining that literary texts are structured in such a way that they obey the logic of form and structure. This means that the elements of the text do not acquire their primary significance from their relation to the extralinguistic world (as is supposedly the case in realist works), but rather through their links to other elements within the text itself. Promoting the primacy of form was one of the main objectives of Anglo-Saxon modernism and of 20th-century formalist criticism (Russian formalism; Anglo-Saxon New Criticism).
In Barnes’s History, structure and form are above all the objects of a metafictional game. One might say that Barnes’s text is excessively organic: it ceaselessly calls the reader’s attention to the fact that its various parts are tightly interlinked, thus making the organic consistency of the whole a little too conspicuous. Barnes achieves this by inserting all kinds of cross-references in his stories:
P. 27 "The reindeer, we couldn’t help noticing ... were among the first to take off, bearing with them their mysterious forebodings."
. This reference to reindeer at the end of the first chapter (“Stowaway”) is only clarified in “Survivor,” more than fifty pages farther into the novel: the forebodings announce a Chernobyl-like nuclear accident 6000 years into the future, which will result in the irradiation of reindeer (“Survivor”).
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P. 72 “... was the woodworm ever upon Noah’s Ark?"
. The sixteenth-century peasants of “Wars,” who can only trust the Bible, are ignorant of the presence of woodworm on Noah’s Ark. Since we have read “Stowaway, we know better (superior awareness of the reader).
P. 245 “... when the woodworm has quietly been gnawing away for years and the bishop’s throne collapses."
. In the “Parenthesis” chapter, Barnes uses the elements of his own fictions (the collapsing of the church throne in “Wars") as metaphorical evidence for his argument on the primacy of love.
P. 165 "You are to move me so that I may see the Moon."
P. 276 “... the position of the skeleton would have allowed the dying Noah to gaze out from the cave and see the moon—the very moon on whose surface Spike Tiggler had so recently stood."
. Having read “Mountain,” we know Spike is mistaking Ms. Fergusson’s skeleton for Noah’s. The cross-reference has an obvious ironical value.
We soon come to expect the recurrence of these ironical cross-references: we become fully aware of the text’s capacity to structure itself by interlinking its own components, and thus to achieve an organic consistency.
P. 125 "How do you turn catastrophe into art?"
There is at least one chapter in which Barnes suggests that the relation of art (and its principle of construction) to reality should be more than just the object of a game. In “Shipwreck"—an account of the genesis of French romantic painter Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa [fig. 200]—Barnes tries indeed to determine how an artist can best do justice both to his referential subject (an historical incident: the shipwreck of a French frigate and its ensuing tragedy of cannibalism) and to the necessities of artistic form. Intriguingly, this argument acknowledges that both planes of experience—the real-life incident and, on the other hand, the rules of art—have their own logic and their own legitimacy. What is needed, therefore, is to find the best possible compromise between the heterogeneous demands of artistic structure and referentiality.
We have no space to follow all the details of Barnes argument. Let me just point out that the author provides a remarkably meticulous discussion of verisimilitude—the process by which realism and emotional authenticity are constructed (even simulated) in a work of art. The main point in this argument is that realism (here in the sense of emotional depth) is not something obvious, something spontaneously given to the artist. Barnes shows on the contrary that creating a painting that produces a suitable “reality effect” requires a process of selection: not all the aspects of the shipwreck story can be described as such because once transposed to a canvass, they would acquire a meaning different from what they had in real life. In other words, the logic of organic form, or the conventions that regulate the Julian Barnes 208 reception of works of art, are likely to inflect the value of elements borrowed from reality. For this reason, Barnes establishes the list of all the elements that Géricault did not paint— decisions that were taken to preserve the integrity of the subject:
P. 127 "A white butterfly, of a species common in France, appeared over [the survivors’] heads fluttering, and settled upon the sail."
P. 129 “... what is true is not necessarily convincing."
Even though the butterfly incident did take place, it would look impossibly sentimental if depicted on the painting. The issue involved here is, first, representativeness: this moment of hope would not adequately reflect the extent of the tragedy: it is therefore not representative. Also, a scene like this would place the painting in a genre (sentimentalism) that Géricault probably thought inappropriate to his subject. This indicates that the creative act is never performed in a cultural vacumm. The painter does not stand isolated in front of a subject that he could freely reproduce: he or she has to take into account the cultural codes that will shape the reception of his work. Technically, we might say that, however realistic, the painting will be received according to intertextual criteria—that is, by comparison with other works in the history of painting.
Figure 200: Théodore Géricault's Scene of Shipwreck (“Le radeau de la Méduse”) Julian Barnes 209
P. 129 "If the raft is under water, you can’t paint the raft"
From Barnes’s documentary account of the shipwreck, we learn that the raft looked considerably different from what Géricault actually painted: in some ways, it did not look at all like our stereotypical image of a raft (we might in fact ask ourselves whether Géricault’s highly famous canvas might not be the very source of our stereotypes for this kind of spectacle). In the survivors’ narrative, we learn that the raft, because of the weight of its passengers, was initially immersed several feet deep in the water. Thus, the sailors were standing up, huddled together, knee-deep in the water. As a painter, Géricault realized that this situation is graphically inappropriate: the raft would be invisible, and the survivors would seem to be standing up on the waves. They would look, Barnes suggests, like a bunch of haggard sailors doing a collective impersonation of Sandro Botticelli’s fifteenth-century representation of the birth of Venus (quite a few nineteenth-century painters, like the master of academicism William Bouguereau, painted the birth of Venus, rising from the ocean).
There is also a compelling graphic reason for not describing the raft in this way: with all the sailors standing up, the composition would be, as Barnes puts it, “stiff with verticals.” Instead Géricault chose to paint the raft above water, with fewer people on it, so that he could structure the painting according to the powerful diagonal composition we are familiar with [fig. 199].
2.3.4.4.4 Transcending history
P. 242 "The history of the world? Just voices echoing in the dark, images that burn for a few centuries and then fade; stories, old stories that sometimes seem to overlap; strange links, impertinent connections."
P. 240 "But I can tell you why to love. Because the history of the world, which only stops at the half-house of love to bulldoze it into rubble, is ridiculous without it."
Beyond the comedy, the pastiche and the metafictional ironies, there is in Barnes’s book an underlying tone of pessimism suggesting that fulfillment, happiness and truth can only be achieved if we manage to escape from history—to bail out of its chronically sinking ship, to take up Barnes’s Ark metaphor. We may recognize in this the pessimistic judgment, already uttered by early-20th-century modernist artists, that history is basically nightmarish—devoid of an overall meaning. Barnes adapts this angst-ridden vision to the context of postmodernism by indicating that history is particularly oppressive in that it is composed of a tangle of meaninglees scenarios—“old stories” that overlap only imperfectly. In this sense, being trapped in history amounts to being caught up in what Fredric Jameson called, in the title of an essay dealing with structuralism, “the prison-house of language"—a web of discourse that never reaches truth or moral absolutes.
In “Parenthesis,” the “half chapter” appended to the other ten, Barnes offers, however, a promise of escape from this dreary environment—the cultivation of love. More accurately, the author designates three areas of experience by which the transcendence of history could be achieved: religion, art, and love. Among these three, love seems best Julian Barnes 210 because, unlike religion, its power still seems intact, and, unlike art, it is not hampered by elitism. Love is, in this sense, the “half-house” of history—a transitional shelter embedded within it. Barnes’s idea of transcendence through love is very much a philosophical commitment, and, as such, lies beyond proof and refutation. Nevertheless, gender theoreticians (researchers who focus on the social organization of sexual roles), social historians and feminist critics might object to Barnes that, to borrow Michel Foucault’s formula, there is such a thing as a “history of sexuality:” the private sphere, intimacy and sexuality do not stand outside of history and can accordingly not serve as the privileged realm Barnes seems to have in mind. The author might, on his part, easily object that love stands beyond sexuality and the organization of the private sphere and is not entirely affected by historical changes that determine those aspects of human experience.
A more pointed objection to Barnes’s philosophy of love might be that there are varieties of love—love of country, nationalism, particularly—that are anchored in history and are nevertheless as emotionally deep-seated as the novelist’s definition of love. Nationalism is inherently dangerous because it is by definition oriented toward the violent exclusion of others. In most ways, it looks like a throwback to a less enlightened historical period. Yet it is impossible to ignore that, subjectively speaking, people who endorse a nationalist program regard this value as authentic and substantial. They may be deluded but are nevertheless sincere—as sincere as Barnes (seems to be) himself when talking about his love life. Love of country is both closely tied to history (because it involves the defense of a territory or a culture) and transcendent to it (it appeals to eternal principles of nationhood). The sincerity of zealous nationalists is attested by the fact that they are ready to commit atrocities in its name or even to sacrifice their own lives. Likewise, another, objection to Barnes’s ideal view of love is the existence of crimes of passion or sexual violence perpetrated in the name of irresistible feelings.
In this light, Barnes’s ideal of an emotion totally untainted by historical time sounds more like a problematic call for transcendence than like an actual program of escape. There is indeed evidence in the author’s History that the desire for transcendence is bound to meet with obstacles, be misunderstood, or to express itself in awkward or unacceptable forms. Barnes’s text contains a number of eccentric figures that are, in their own ways, trying to achieve the kind of transcendence that the author prescribes in “Parenthesis:” Kath, the protagonist of “Survivor,” is one of them: she seeks to recreate a private paradise immune to nuclear contamination. Miss Fergusson and Spike Tiggler belong in this category as well: they wish to pay their respects to Biblical patriarch Noah. Of course, in Barnes’s ironical stories, these characters are questionable role models: their motives are never quite angelic or clear-sighted. Kath seems paranoid; Miss Fergusson’s religiosity is bigoted and seems largely motivated by the young woman’s opposition to her father; Spike’s mysticism is nationalistic and profit-oriented. Yet all of them are willing to make considerable sacrifices (their life, their respectability) for values that, they think, transcend history.
Finally, it is interesting to point out that Barnes himself seems to be using the “Parenthesis” chapter to suggest how the dream of transcendence affects the writer’s practice. The discussion of love in the “Parenthesis” chapter, serves indeed as an oasis of authentic reflection in the middle of all the other stories. It is characteristic that it should be written in a style that, in its own way, transcends the supposedly “inauthentic” idiom of pastiche or parody. Barnes’s essayistic, digressive reflections seem in this sense meant to Julian Barnes 211 construct what we might call a ‘voice of authenticity’ (see 5.4.3.4.1.1 for a discussion of this issue in Pynchon). We have the feeling that, in those pages, the narrator seeks to show that he is not tied down to one set of conventions. Whereas the other chapters scrupulously follow the models prescribed by the history of literary genres, he is here free to do just anything, to follow his inspiration of the moment. Hence the choice of letting his readers witness the dissection of the ox’s heart, or of giving us a direct report of his thoughts as he lies alongside his lover. This creates an impression of immediacy, of lived authenticity that a fictional narrative can never convey. Of course, we must entirely trust his good faith: as readers, we have to contemplate the possibility that this tone of intimate authenticity might still be a literary construction: it could be the fictional account of the inner life of a narrator who is not Barnes himself.